@inproceedings{42555fd74a8c4ca6aa50a105b9e85593,
title = "Steering Starbugs: routing autonomous fibre positioners for TAIPAN",
abstract = "The TAIAPAN instrument, being developed by the Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) - Macquarie University, deploys 159 Starbug robots to position optical fibers on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. The Starbug Routing algorithm created for the instrument allows the autonomous robots to reach accuracies of 0.5 arcsec of the assigned target. It employs a 3 stage tiered approach to find a collision-free path for Starbugs of increasing complexity and computational cost. For each Starbug a path is attempted using a direct simultaneous movement. If unsuccessful, subsequently more complex (and expensive) methods are tried until a valid path is found or the target is discarded. The system uses a MongoDB database to record and retrieve starbug locations and properties which allow in-situ re-routing to take place as well.",
keywords = "Path allocation, Routing, SPIE, Starbug, TAIPAN",
author = "Nuwanthika Fernando and Carlos Bacigalupo and Tony Farrell and Nuria Lorente",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.1117/12.2541296",
language = "English",
isbn = "9781510631465",
series = "Proceedings of SPIE",
publisher = "SPIE",
pages = "1120316--1--1120316--5",
editor = "Simon Ellis and C{\'e}line d'Orgeville",
booktitle = "Advances in Optical Astronomical Instrumentation 2019",
address = "United States",
note = "Advances in Optical Astronomical Instrumentation 2019 ; Conference date: 09-12-2019 Through 12-12-2019",
}