Nigel A. Dipper, Nik Looker, Deli Geng, Eddy J. Younger, Richard M. Myers, Alastair G. Basden, Gerard C. Rousset, Eric Gendron and Zoltan Hubert, “The real-time control system for the CANARY multi-object adaptive optics on-sky demonstrator”, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, vol. 7736, pp. 174, San Diego, USA, 2010.
Abstract: CANARY is a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) system designed to demonstrate the AO aspects of the proposed E-ELT multi-object spectrograph EAGLE. The first phase of Canary will be executed on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope in mid 2010. We describe here the AO Real-time Control System (RTCS) for Canary. This is based on a distributed architecture of components interconnected by a fast serial fabric (sFPDP). The hardware used is a hybrid of FPGA and CPU technology. The system middleware is based on CORBA. The future development path for this system is described targeted at the EAGLE instrument.