Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The New Robotic Telescope (NRT) is a fully autonomous robotic four-meter class telescope located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. The autonomous nature requires a robust, fault tolerant, real time Control System. This is achieved by using proven industrial Beckhoff PLCs and an Ethercat data bus for real time operation. The Ethercat data bus is used to link all pieces of PLC hardware together, this drastically cuts down on the number of control cables going through rotators and cable wraps and increases reliability with a ring topology giving cable redundancy. The PLC code is developed using a Unit testing framework which lowers the risk of breaking expensive hardware during code changes and allows extra functionality to be added easily. This is being implemented to allow new hardware to be added easily and old hardware can later be swapped out for newer models, lowering maintenance costs. The PLCs are controlled by a Kubernetes Cluster using the OPC-UA protocol. The telescope functional safety will be tightly integrated with Beckhoff Twinsafe allowing complete telemetry all the way up the software stack.
Garner et al. (Thu,) studied this question.