A Complete Affordable Control System for Remote Astronomical Observing Accompanied by an Intelligent Controller

Abstract

This paper comprises two studies; the first one provides an advanced and low-cost implementation for a remote astronomical platform applicable to small and medium-sized telescopes. It has been carried out for the 14-inch observatory, which includes a Celestron German Equatorial (CGE) telescope at the Kottamia astronomical observatory (KAO) in Egypt. This integrated control system is based on embedded systems, internet of things (IoT) technology, row packets communication procedure, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) based on the Internet Protocol (IP). Using this platform, remote astronomers could control the whole system, observe, receive images and view them efficiently and safely without any human physical intervention. The proposed design has been achieved without dependence on commercial control kits or software. Indeed, many previous studies have focused on this field; however, their area of interest was limited or non-affordable. The excellence in this practical research is revealed and compared with others in terms of cost, inclusiveness, and communication speed. The other contribution of this research is to enhance the performance of the telescope pointing and tracking to be adapted with remote action. It has been achieved based on the mathematical model of the telescope where two fractional controllers have been applied, tilt integral-derivative (TID) and integral derivative-tilted (ID-T) controllers. After that, they have been optimized using a recent optimization algorithm called the peafowl optimization algorithm (POA) and compared with one of the well-known algorithms, particle swarm optimization (PSO). Simulation results under the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment reveal that modified ID-T-based POA has minimized the pointing error sharply. Moreover, compared with previous studies, it has significantly improved the telescope system characteristics represented in overshoot, settling, and rising periods.