An autonomous observation and control system based on EPICS and RTS2 for Antarctic telescopes

For unattended telescopes in Antarctic, the remote operation, autonomous observation and control are essential. An EPICS-(Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) and RTS2-(Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version) based autonomous observation and control system with remoted operation is intr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Main Authors: Zhang, Guang-yu, Wang, Jian, Tang, Peng-yi, Jia, Ming-hao, Chen, Jie, Dong, Shu-cheng, Jiang, Fengxin, Wu, Wen-qing, Liu, Jia-jing, Zhang, Hong-fei
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Oxford University Press 2015
Subjects:
Article
Antarctic
Antarc*
Online Access:http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/455/2/1654
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv2299
Description
Summary:For unattended telescopes in Antarctic, the remote operation, autonomous observation and control are essential. An EPICS-(Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) and RTS2-(Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version) based autonomous observation and control system with remoted operation is introduced in this paper. EPICS is a set of open source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments while RTS2 is an open source environment for control of a fully autonomous observatory. Using the advantage of EPICS and RTS2, respectively, a combined integrated software framework for autonomous observation and control is established that use RTS2 to fulfil the function of astronomical observation and use EPICS to fulfil the device control of telescope. A command and status interface for EPICS and RTS2 is designed to make the EPICS IOC (Input/Output Controller) components integrate to RTS2 directly. For the specification and requirement of control system of telescope in Antarctic, core components named Executor and Auto-focus for autonomous observation is designed and implemented with remote operation user interface based on browser-server mode. The whole system including the telescope is tested in Lijiang Observatory in Yunnan Province for practical observation to complete the autonomous observation and control, including telescope control, camera control, dome control, weather information acquisition with the local and remote operation.

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