AutomationShield Online

AutomationShield Online is the result of a diploma thesis at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. It presents a modular system for controlling didactic AutomationShield devices remotely through a modern web interface, using the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi microcontroller.

📘 Project Overview

This project extends the AutomationShield initiative, which provides open-source, low-cost educational hardware for experimenting with control systems like PID, LQ, and MPC on various physical models.

The goal of this thesis was to lower the barrier of entry for students and educators by enabling control and visualization of AutomationShield experiments directly from a browser—without the need to recompile and upload Arduino code for every change.

The entire system is currently deployed and running at:

🔗 https://mrsolutions.sk/automationshield/index.php

This live version includes full functionality along with complete tutorials, multilingual interface, model selection, real-time data visualization, and more.

✅ Free to use – available for educational, testing, or demonstration purposes without restrictions.

🎯 Main Features

• Full-stack system for web-based control of Arduino-connected AutomationShield devices
• Modular, scalable architecture using Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and PHP backend
• GUI for selecting control types and entering experiment parameters
• Data logging and visualization through responsive graphs
• Language switching (multilingual support)
• Light/Dark mode and mobile-friendly design
• Integration of multiple AutomationShield models (e.g. AeroShield, FloatShield, MagnetoShield, FurutaShield)
• Built-in user tutorials and documentation

✅ Supported Features by Device

Method	AeroShield	FloatShield	MagnetoShield	FurutaShield
PID	✅	✅	✅	❌
MPC	EMPC	MPC+Kal	EMPC	EMPC
MPC Manual	✅	✅	✅	❌
LQ	LQI	LQ+Kal	LQ	LQR
LQ Manual	✅	✅	✅	❌
Identification	✅	❌	❌	❌
Closed-loop ID	❌	✅	✅	❌
Open-loop	✅	✅	❌	❌

🧠 Educational Impact

This system is intended to support interactive learning in automation and control engineering. It can be used in both university and secondary school environments to help students learn the fundamentals of control theory through hands-on experiments—without requiring deep programming knowledge.