EPICS-based device control of RACS2 for astronomical telescopes

摘要

EPICS (experimental physics and industrial control system) is an open source, cross platform, distributed real-time control framework, which is widely used to control devices such as particle accelerators, large-scale experiments, large telescopes and other large-scale experiments. In the telescope control system, it is necessary to meet the real-time and distributed control requirements. For the distributed telescope observation and control system RACS2 (Remote Autonomous Control System), it can be divided into three layers: user interface layer, observation control layer and equipment control layer. This paper mainly discusses the content related to the device control layer, which is mainly used to control the equipment of a telescope. We use EPICS framework to realize the unified control of telescope, camera, dome, weather station and other equipment. The device control layer of RACS2 realizes the conversion from EPICS protocol to RACS2 protocol through EPICSBridge module, so users can control the devices through RACS2.