The Australian Astronomical Observatory's TAIPAN instrument deploys 150 Starbug robots to position optical fibres to accuracies of 0.3 arcsec, on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. This paper describes the software system developed to control and monitor the Starbugs, with particular emphasis on the automated path-finding algorithms, and the metrology software which keeps track of the position and motion of individual Starbugs as they independently move in a crowded field. The software employs a tiered approach to find a collision-free path for every Starbug, from its current position to its target location. This consists of three path-finding stages of increasing complexity and computational cost. For each Starbug a path is attempted using a simple method. If unsuccessful, subsequently more complex (and expensive) methods are tried until a valid path is found or the target is flagged as unreachable.
@article{arxiv.1608.02645,
title = {AAO Starbugs: software control and associated algorithms},
author = {Nuria P. F. Lorente and Minh V. Vuong and Keith Shortridge and Tony J. Farrell and Scott Smedley and Sungwook E. Hong and Carlos Bacigalupo and Michael Goodwin and Kyler Kuehn and Christophe Satorre},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.02645},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
10 pages, to be published in Proc. SPIE 9913, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy IV; 2016