TPS based on trilateration for the feed measurement of FAST

摘要

Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope( FAST) is the largest sensitive single dish radio telescope in the world,in which the control and measurement of the feed is one crucial section of the FAST control system. Trilateration is presented to obtain three-dimensional coordinate for tracking feed focus cabin. Every three total stations chase prism movement to be attached on feed focus cabin and the prism position is determined from the measured distances based on the principle of trilateration. Therefore,feed position is determined from three prisms on the focus cabin. This study is to assess the accuracy and reliability of trilateration calculation on tracking focus cabin of FAST. Different arrangement of total stations on trilateration is theoretically studied. Through experiment,the proposed method shows that the accuracy is better than that of the polar coordinate measurement. The average root mean square error is lower than 0. 6 mm,which is found to have high accuracy and reliability.