The feed cabin

May 28, 2025

The feed cabin a sophisticated system integrating optical, mechanical, electrical, measurement and control technologies. It devotes to real-time pose adjustment and compensation of the mounted receiver platform, achieving high positioning accuracy of the feeds receviers as required by FAST observation. The cabin is 13 meters in diameter and 6.5 meters high, and weighs 30 tons. Its main compensators include an orthogonal-two-axis rotator and a Stewart platform (hexapod). The rotator can compensate pointing angle of the receiver up to ±18° around each of the two orthogonal axes. The Stewart platform plays as the role of the secondary fine-tuning because it further compensates the residual pose errors of the receiver so that spatial positioning error is less than 10 mm in root mean square (rms) and orientation error less than 0.5°.