Robotic Autonomous Observatories: A Historical Perspective

This paper presents a historical introduction to the field of Robotic Astronomy, from the point of view of a scientist working in this field for more than a decade. The author discusses the basic definitions, the differing telescope control operating systems, observatory managers, as well as a few current scientific applications. 1. Introduction Early designs of what can be considered precursors to robots started in the First Century A.D. in Byzantium, Alexandria, and other places, but the first automatons called “robots” appeared in 1921 following the name of “robot” by the Czech writer Karel ？apek who took it from his brother Josef [1]. See Figure 1. Years later (1941), Isaac Asimov coined the word “Robotics” [2] for the science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture, and application. Figure 1: A scene in ？apek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1921) showing three robots, adapted from [ 4]. But what is a robot? Hereby the author introduces some widely accepted definitions. Robot: A mechanical system that executes repetitive pre-programmed remote tasks with good accuracy with human assistance. Example: Industrial robotic arm. Teleoperated Robot: A mechanical system that executes various remote tasks with good accuracy and whose behaviour can be dynamically modified with human assistance. Example: Submarine research robots. Autonomous Robot: A mechanical system which executes various remote simple tasks with good accuracy and is able to adapt itself to changes during the task execution without any kind of human assistance. Example: Rovers devoted to planetary research. Intelligent Robot: An automatic device which is capable of performing many complex tasks with seemingly human intelligence. The first attempts to robotize telescopes were developed by astronomers after electromechanical interfaces to computers became common at observatories. Computer control is the most powerful technique for research today, but computer systems are inherently low voltage and are very suspectable to electrical noise. Thus putting electromechanical devices under computer control was particularly challenging. Early examples were expensive, had limited capabilities, and included a large number of unique subsystems, both in hardware and software. This contributed to a lack of progress in the development of robotic telescopes early in their history, but the situation was going to change rapidly. Similarly, the abovementioned definitions can be extended to Robotic Astronomical Observatories (following the consensus reached after 1 hour of discussion amongst the