Remote Labs Platform – Democratizing STEM Education

Large-scale remote experimentation platform for accessible STEM learning

Overview

Access to laboratory infrastructure remains a major barrier for students in rural and under-resourced institutions.
This project focused on building a large-scale remote laboratory platform to enable students to perform real experiments over the internet.

The work was carried out at IIIT Hyderabad, supported by PRIF and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), India.

Problem

  • Many institutions lack physical lab infrastructure.
  • Rural and underrepresented students face limited access to experimental learning.
  • Hardware-based experiments cannot easily scale to thousands of learners.

We asked:

Can physical experiments be remotely triggered, monitored, and evaluated using computer vision and IoT systems?

System Architecture

The platform enabled:

  • Remote triggering of physical lab setups
  • Real-time video streaming of experiments
  • Computer vision-based output evaluation
  • Automated result validation
  • Scalable web-based access

Students could:

  • Perform experiments from anywhere
  • Observe real-time outputs
  • Receive computed results automatically

Technical Components

  • IoT-enabled hardware setups
  • Computer Vision models for output analysis
  • Web-based control interface
  • Backend infrastructure for experiment orchestration
  • Real-time streaming and logging

Contributions

  • Contributed to development and deployment of a scalable remote experimentation framework
  • Integrated CV-based output validation mechanisms
  • Supported large-scale student usage across institutions
  • Enabled remote access to STEM labs for thousands of learners

This work contributed to a publication:

  • CV and IoT-based Remote Triggered Labs – FiCloud 2022
  • Related US Patent: System and Method for Implementing an Experiment Remotely using a Computer Vision Model

Impact

  • Democratized experimental learning
  • Reduced dependency on physical lab presence
  • Scaled access to engineering education
  • Bridged IoT, Computer Vision, and education technology

References