A Study on Universal Observation Control System And Its Application For LAMOST

TL;DR

This paper presents a universal observation control system (UOCS) designed to improve automation, robustness, and performance in optical telescopes like LAMOST, replacing outdated architectures and supporting future applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel UOCS architecture that decouples modules, uses event-driven messaging, and enhances automation and robustness over traditional systems.

Findings

UOCS outperforms existing OCS in observation performance.

UOCS reduces operator complexity and communication errors.

UOCS has been successfully applied to LAMOST and planned for other telescopes.

Abstract

{The observatory control system (OCS), a part of automated control of Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), runs on the CentOS6 platform and implements the communication between modules based on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). However, CORBA is complicated and has limited development support; moreover, the official support for CentOS6 has ended. OCS inherently has some shortcomings such as the over-concentration of control and the blocking of device status processing, which hinder the realization of automated observation control of LAMOST. Therefore, this study designs and implements a universal observation control system (UOCS) for optical telescopes. The UOCS takes the device command as the basic execution unit, controls the device execution logic using observation script, controls the observation logic by event-driven messaging, and realizes mutual decoupling between modules via a distributed control mode, thereby ensuring high system robustness. The UOCS performs significantly better than OCS in terms of the observation performance, operator complexity, and communication error. Currently, UOCS is applied to the automated control of some devices and subsystems in LAMOST observation. It will be applied to the automated observation control of Multi-channel Photometric Survey Telescope by 2021.