PLATO control and robotics

PLATO, the ‘PLATeau Observatory’, is a robotic Antarctic observatory developed by UNSW for deployment to Dome A, the highest point on the Antarctic plateau. PLATO is designed to run autonomously for up to a year, providing power, communications and thermal management for a suite of scientific and si...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daniel M. Luong-van, Michael C. B. Ashley, Jon R. Everett, Jon S. Lawrence, John W. V. Storey
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Astronomical observatory
Site testing
Automation
Robotics
Control
Antarctic
Plato
The Antarctic
Antarc*
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.147.5311
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mcba/pubs/luong-van08a.pdf
Description
Summary:PLATO, the ‘PLATeau Observatory’, is a robotic Antarctic observatory developed by UNSW for deployment to Dome A, the highest point on the Antarctic plateau. PLATO is designed to run autonomously for up to a year, providing power, communications and thermal management for a suite of scientific and site-testing instruments. To achieve this degree of autonomy, multiple-redundant Linux-based ‘supervisor ’ computers, each with their own watchdog-timer and Iridium satellite-modem, communicate with each other and with the outside world. The active supervisor computer monitors and controls the PLATO power distribution, thermal and engine management subsystems via a CAN (Control Area Network) bus. High-bandwidth communication between the instruments and the supervisor computers is via a 100 Mbps Local Area Network. Data is stored in cold-verified flash memory. The PLATO computers monitor up to 140 analog channels and distribute electrical power and heating to 96 current-monitored channels via an intelligent loadshedding algorithm.

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