Related papers: Starbug fibre positioning robots: performance and …
Starbugs are miniature piezoelectric 'walking' robots with the ability to simultaneously position many optical fibres across a telescope's focal plane. Their simple design incorporates two piezoceramic tubes to form a pair of concentric…
Starbugs are miniaturised robotic devices that position optical fibres over a telescope's focal plane in parallel operation for high multiplex spectroscopic surveys. The key advantage of the Starbug positioning system is its potential to…
The Australian Astronomical Observatory has extensively prototyped a new robotic positioner to allow simultaneous positioning of optical fibers at the focal plane called 'Starbugs'. The Starbug devices each consist of two concentric…
The TAIPAN instrument, currently being developed for the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, makes use of the AAO's Starbug technology to deploy 150 science fibres to target positions on…
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…
We explore the range of wide field multi-object instrument concepts taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the Starbug focal plane positioning concept. Advances to familiar instrument concepts, such as fiber positioners and…
The ability to position multiple miniaturized wavefront sensors precisely over large focal surfaces are advantageous to multi-object adaptive optics. The Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) has prototyped a compact and lightweight…
Taipan is a multi-object spectroscopic galaxy survey starting in 2017 that will cover 2pi steradians over the southern sky, and obtain optical spectra for about two million galaxies out to z<0.4. Taipan will use the newly-refurbished 1.2m…
This work presents the design of Stickbug, a six-armed, multi-agent, precision pollination robot that combines the accuracy of single-agent systems with swarm parallelization in greenhouses. Precision pollination robots have often been…
Fiber-fed spectrographs dedicated to observing massive portions of the sky are increasingly being more demanded within the astronomical community. For all the fiber-fed instruments, the primordial and common problem is the positioning of…
WEAVE is a 1000-fiber multi-object spectroscopic facility for the 4.2~m William Herschel Telescope. It will feature a double-headed pick-and-place fiber positioning robot comprising commercially available robotic axes. This paper presents…
The integration of satellite communication into mobile devices represents a paradigm shift in connectivity, yet the performance characteristics under motion and environmental occlusion remain poorly understood. We present the Starlink…
At a fraction the total cost of an equivalent orbital mission, scientific balloon-borne platforms, operating above 99.7% of the Earth's atmosphere, offer attractive, competitive, and effective observational capabilities -- namely space-like…
The use of autonomous robots in space is an essential part of the "New Space" commercial ecosystem of assembly and re-use of space hardware components in Earth orbit and beyond. The STARFAB project aims to create a ground demonstration of…
In astronomy, multi-object spectrographs employ fibre positioning robots to couple the light from multiple astronomy sources (stars or galaxies) into multiple multi-mode fibres, which are distributed across the focal plane of the telescope.…
Small-scale robots offer significant potential in minimally-invasive medical procedures. Due to the nature of soft biological tissues, however, robots are exposed to complex environments with various challenges in locomotion, which is…
Highly-multiplexed, robotic, fiber-fed spectroscopic surveys are observing tens of millions of stars and galaxies. For many systems, accurate positioning relies on imaging the fibers in the focal plane and feeding that information back to…
The increased need in pointing performance for Earth observation and science Space missions together with the use of lighter and flexible structures directly come with the need of a robust pointing performance budget from the very beginning…
The Australian Astronomical Observatory's 'tilting spine' fibre positioning technology has been redeveloped to provide superior performance in a smaller package. The new design offers demonstrated closed-loop positioning errors of 2.8…
Massive spectroscopic survey are becoming trendy in astrophysics and cosmology, as they can address new fundamental knowledge such as Galactic Archaeology and probe the nature of the mysterious Dark Energy. To enable massive spectroscopic…