Robotic telescope scheduling: the Liverpool Telescope experience

Abstract

The Liverpool Telescope (LT) is a fully robotic 2m telescope located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. It has been in operation since July 2003 and has just started (April 2004) initial robotic operations. In this paper we describe the implementation of the heuristic dispatch scheduler, its interaction with the Robotic Control System (RCS), details of performance metrics we intend to use and present some initial results.