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Fully re-orientable small spacecraft are now supported by commercial technologies, allowing them to point their instruments in any direction and capture images, with short notice. When combined with improved onboard processing, and…
Starshades are a leading technology to enable the direct detection and spectroscopic characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. To keep the starshade and telescope aligned over large separations, reliable sensing of the peak of the…
Small-size robots offer access to spaces that are inaccessible to larger ones. This type of access is crucial in applications such as drug delivery, environmental detection, and collection of small samples. However, there are some tasks…
We present the method behind HubPUG, a software tool built for recovering systemic proper motions (PMs) of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) fields with two epochs of observations by utilizing stars observed by Gaia as a foreground frame of…
The Argus Optical Array will be the first all-sky, arcsecond-resolution, 5-m class telescope. The 55 GPix Array, currently being prototyped, will consist of 900 telescopes with 61 MPix very-low-noise CMOS detectors enabling sub-second…
We present the design, fabrication, and testing of R-FLEX, a novel flexure mechanism for next-generation fiber-fed astronomical instruments. As the current Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) revolutionizes cosmology with over 56…
To reproduce natural standing-up motion, recent studies have emphasized the importance of coordination between the assisting robot and the human. However, many non-wearable assistive devices have struggled to replicate natural motion…
We introduce a system of light driven microscopic autonomous moving particles that move on a flat surface. The design is simple, yet effective: Micrometer sized objects with wedge shape are produced by photopolymerization, they are covered…
The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a fiber fed multi-object spectrometer for the Subaru Telescope that will conduct a variety of targeted surveys for studies of dark energy, galaxy evolution, and galactic archaeology. The key to the…
Ants are six-legged insects that can carry loads ten times heavier than their body weight. Since having six-legs, they are intrinsically stable. They are powerful and can carry heavy loads. For these reasons, in this paper a new parallel…
This document contains a detailed description of the STAR-loc dataset. For a quick starting guide please refer to the associated Github repository (https://github.com/utiasASRL/starloc). The dataset consists of stereo camera data…
Dedicated accelerometers have been developed for the MICROSCOPE mission taking into account the specific range of acceleration to be measured on board the satellite. Considering one micro-g and even less as the full range of the instrument,…
True microrobots, in contrast with externally controlled microparticles, must harvest or carry their own source of energy, as well as their own (preferably programmable) microcontroller of actuators for locomotion, using information…
Recently, fiber optic sensors such as fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been widely investigated for shape reconstruction and force estimation of flexible surgical robots. However, most existing approaches need precise model parameters of…
The study of collective animal behaviour must progress through a comparison between the theoretical predictions of numerical models and data coming from empirical observations. To this aim it is important to develop methods of…
Massive (>~ 8 solar masses) stars are the progenitors of many astrophysical systems, yet key aspects of their structure and evolution are poorly understood. Asteroseismology has the potential to solve these open puzzles, however, sampling…
The exponential growth of large-scale telescope arrays has boosted time-domain astronomy development but introduced operational bottlenecks, including labor-intensive observation planning, data processing, and real-time decision-making.…
Symmetry is a central organizing principle in natural systems, yet its use as a unifying design strategy in robotics has largely remained limited to geometric form. We show that symmetry can instead be leveraged at the level of dynamic…
A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
Mega-constellations in Low Earth Orbit have the potential to revolutionise worldwide internet access. The concomitant potential of these mega-constellations to impact space sustainability, however, has prompted concern from space actors as…