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Robotic autonomy at centimeter scale requires compact and miniaturization-friendly actuation integrated with sensing and neural network processing assembly within a tiny form factor. Applications of such systems have witnessed significant…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) operates four fully automatic telescopes to search for occultations of stars by Kuiper Belt Objects. It is a versatile facility that is also useful for the study of initial optical GRB…
We present the design and experimental results of the first 1-DOF, hip-actuated bipedal robot. While passive dynamic walking is simple by nature, many existing bipeds inspired by this form of walking are complex in control, mechanical…
We developed an optical-resolution photoacoustic microscope (OR-PAM) capable of changing focal plane with high-speed by using a tunable acoustic gradient (TAG) lens. In our system, a TAG lens is designed to continuously changing the focal…
The issues related to moving elements in space and instruments working in broader wavelength ranges lead to a need for robust polarimeters, efficient on a wide spectral domain, and adapted to space conditions. As part of the UVMag…
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…
Small-scale robots hold great potential for targeted cargo delivery in minimally-inv asive medicine. However, current robots often face challenges to locomote efficiently on slip pery biological tissue surfaces, especially when loaded with…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
New multi-core imaging fibre bundles -- hexabundles -- being developed at the University of Sydney will provide simultaneous integral field spectroscopy for hundreds of celestial sources across a wide angular field. These are a natural…
TianQin is a proposed mission for space-based gravitational-wave detection that features a triangular constellation in circular high Earth orbits. The mission entails three drag-free controlled satellites and long-range laser interferometry…
Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation…
Optical tweezers are highly versatile laser traps for neutral microparticles, with fundamental applications in physics and in single molecule cell biology. Force measurements are performed by converting the stiffness response to…
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…
Modular robotics holds immense potential for space exploration, where reliability, repairability, and reusability are critical for cost-effective missions. Coordination between heterogeneous units is paramount for precision tasks -- whether…
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…
The most pressing problems in modern astrophysics have often required the largest telescopes. With the cost scaling of mirror diameters, the field as a whole is faced with a challenge -- how to replicate or improve on the collecting area…
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…
We describe the development and implementation of a light-weight, fully autonomous 2-axis pointing and stabilization system designed for balloon-borne astronomical payloads. The system is developed using off-the-shelf components such as…
Open source hardware has the potential to revolutionise the way we build scientific instruments; with the advent of readily-available 3D printers, mechanical designs can now be shared, improved and replicated faster and more easily than…
This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial…