RACS2: A Framework of Remote Autonomous Control System for Telescope Observation and its application

TL;DR

This paper introduces RACS2, a distributed autonomous control framework for telescopes that enables complex, intelligent, and remote observation tasks through modular components and multi-language interfaces.

Contribution

The paper presents RACS2, a novel distributed architecture framework that integrates instrument control, scheduling, and remote management for autonomous telescope observations.

Findings

Successfully implemented on DATs and space object telescopes.

Enabled remote autonomous observations with substantial data collection.

Supports multi-language interfaces including Python and EPICS.

Abstract

As the demand of astronomical observation rising, the telescope systems are becoming more and more complex. Thus, the observatory control software needs to be more intelligent, they have to control each instrument inside the observatory, finish the observation tasks autonomously, and report the information to users if needed. We developed a distributed autonomous observatory control framework named Remote Autonomous Control System 2nd, RACS2 to meet these requirements. The RACS2 framework uses decentralized distributed architecture, instrument control software and system service such as observation control service are implemented as different components. The communication between components is implemented based on a high-performance serialization library and a light-weighted messaging library.The interfaces towards python and Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) are implemented, so the RACS2 framework can communicate with EPICS based device control software and python-based software. Several system components including log, executor, scheduler and other modules are developed to help observation. Observation tasks can be programmed with python language, and the plans are scheduled by the scheduler component to achieve autonomous observation.A set of web service is implemented based on the FastAPI framework, with which user can control and manage the framework remotely.Based on the RACS2 framework, we have implemented the DATs telescope's observation system and the space object observation system.We performed remote autonomous observation and received many data with these systems.