Development of a new software system for radio telescope using robot operating system

Abstract

Owing to recent performance improvement and lower pricing of computers, built-in computers are equipped in virtually all measurement/control hardware, and small computers (e.g., Raspberry-Pi) can be obtained inexpensively to monitor the environment and/or hardware status. Those devices are able to communicate via network. The system having flexibility adaptable with the rapidly changing trend of hardware is desired in order to provide powerful functions quickly for the telescope control. Software developed for robot operations could be used for this purpose that controlling distributed and network-linked hardware. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source software platform and one of the most used frameworks for robot operations. It has a number of libraries and tools to help us create robot applications. Under this background, we are developing NECST (NEw Control System for Telescope) using ROS framework. In NECST, each atomic operation (such as device operation and arithmetic operation) is divided into a node which is an elemental object in ROS. Nodes are grouped and packaged by their functionalities for convenience. The control systems of telescope and receiver are built by combining those packages. Since there are about ∼100 nodes even in the telescope control part, we also developed utilities to manage nodes that visualizes sent/received data in real time. Currently, NECST is installed and operated mainly for receiver control and antenna control of 1.85-m mm-submm wave telescope.