PLATO control and robotics

• 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

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.