Development of remote control subsystem for the positioning motors

Radio telescope RT-32 located in Irbene, Latvia is a very important instrument for radio astronomy in the Baltic Sea region. Radio telescope is operated locally and manually entering commands. In order to allow such an important instrument to use for wider circle of scientists, it is necessary to create a remote control subsystem, which will allow to control radio telescope in the same accuracy as local control. Also, antenna positioning subsystem should have a graphical user interface to simplify control. This paper describes development of the radio telescope RT-32 remote positioning motor subsystem. Firstly, there is analyzed scientific researches, and their results. Secondly, there is identified functional and non-functional requirements for the subsystem. Thirdly, there was developed a common architecture model, data flow diagrams, which describes the data flows between the developed remote positioning engine control subsystem processes. Subsystem was implemented with National Instruments LabVIEW software, which allowed to create virtual instrument for graphical user interface. The developed virtual instrument allows precise remote control of radio telescope positioning motors, to get the control parameters and save them to text file and display the received parameters using the created graphical user interface. Finally, there is performed data analysis, which showed that radial basis function neural networks could be used to predict the turn time to set position