Protocols for Robotic Telescope Networks

Abstract

Autonomous robotic observatories can use modern communications to receive pertinent information from institutes that generate events to observe (e.g., supernovae, near-earth asteroids, gravitational lensings, and gamma-ray bursts). This paper is addressed to astronomers who are not specialists in computer science. We give explanations of some basic and advanced protocols to receive events and how to implement them in a robotic observatory software. We describe messages such as GCN notices, VOEvents or RTML, and protocols such as CGI, HTTP, SOAP, RSS, and XMPP.