  The performance of on telescope depend strongly on its operating conditions.
During pointing the telescope can move at a relatively high velocity, and the
system can tolerate trajectory position errors higher than during tracking. On
the contrary, during tracking Alt-Az telescopes generally move slower but still
in a large dynamic range. In this case, the position errors must be as close to
zero as possible. Tracking is one of the essential factors that affect the
quality of astronomical observations. In this paper, a hybrid Genetic-Fuzzy
approach to control the movement of a two-link direct-drive Celestron telescope
is introduced. The proposed controller uses the Genetic algorithm (GA) for
optimizing a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) to improve the tracking of the
14-inches Celestron telescope of the Kottamia Astronomical Observatory (KAO).
The fuzzy logic input is a vector of the position error and its rate of change,
and the output is torque. The GA objective function used here is the Integral
Time Absolute Error (ITAE). The proposed method is compared with a conventional
Proportional-Differential (PD) controller, an optimized PD controller with a
GA, and a Fuzzy controller. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed
controller to improve the dynamic response of the overall system.
