Fibre Positioning Revisited: The use an off-the-shelf assembly robot for OPTIMOS-EVE

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of using commercial off-the-shelf industrial robots for precise fibre positioning in the OPTIMOS-EVE instrument for the E-ELT, aiming to reduce costs while maintaining required accuracy.

Contribution

It assesses the performance and practicality of off-the-shelf robots for fibre positioning in astronomical instruments, proposing a cost-effective alternative to custom solutions.

Findings

Commercial robots meet the accuracy requirements for OPTIMOS-EVE.

Using off-the-shelf robots can significantly reduce instrument costs.

The approach is extendable to other planned astronomical instruments.

Abstract

The OPTIMOS-EVE instrument proposed for the E-ELT aims to use the maximum field of view available to the E-ELT in the limit of natural or ground-layer-corrected seeing for high multiplex fibre-fed multi-object spectroscopy in the visible and near-IR. At the bare nasmyth focus of the telescope, this field corresponds to a focal plane 2.3m in diameter, with a plate-scale of ~3mm/arcsec. The required positioning accuracy that is implied by seeing limited performance at this plate-scale brings the system into the range of performances of commercial off-the-shelf robots that are commonly used in industrial manufacturing processes. The cost-benefits that may be realized through such an approach must be offset against the robot performance, and the ease with which a useful software system can be implemented. We therefore investigate whether the use of such a system is indeed feasible for OPTIMOS-EVE, and the possibilities of extending this approach to other instruments that are currently in the planning stage.