TALOS (Total Automation of LabVIEW Operations for Science): A framework for autonomous control systems for complex experiments

TL;DR

TALOS is an open-source framework that automates and unifies control systems for complex physics experiments, enabling autonomous operation, high stability, and reproducibility in experimental setups.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, asynchronous control system framework that simplifies coding, enhances stability, and allows full autonomous operation of complex physics experiments.

Findings

System operated fully autonomously during data collection

Demonstrated high stability and reproducibility

Applicable to various physics experiments beyond AEgIS

Abstract

Modern physics experiments are frequently very complex, relying on multiple simultaneous events to happen in order to obtain the desired result. The experiment control system plays a central role in orchestrating the measurement setup: However, its development is often treated as secondary with respect to the hardware, its importance becoming evident only during the operational phase. Therefore, the AEgIS (Antimatter Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) collaboration has created a framework for easily coding control systems, specifically targeting atomic, quantum, and antimatter experiments. This framework, called Total Automation of LabVIEW Operations for Science (TALOS), unifies all the machines of the experiment in a single entity, thus enabling complex high-level decisions to be taken, and it is constituted by separate modules, called MicroServices, that run concurrently and asynchronously. This enhances the stability and reproducibility of the system while allowing for continuous integration and testing while the control system is running. The system demonstrated high stability and reproducibility, running completely unsupervised during the night and weekends of the data-taking campaigns. The results demonstrate the suitability of TALOS to manage an entire physics experiment in full autonomy: being open-source, experiments other than the AEgIS experiment can benefit from it.