Complete coordination of robotic fiber positioners for massive spectroscopic surveys

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complete coordination of robotic fiber positioners in spectroscopic surveys, proposing a new artificial potential field method to improve their collective performance and verifying it through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel artificial potential field approach for coordinating positioners, along with conditions to achieve complete coordination.

Findings

Proposed a new artificial potential field for positioner coordination.

Identified conditions for complete coordination.

Validated approach through simulations.

Abstract

Robotic fiber positioners play a vital role in the generation of massive spectroscopic surveys. The more complete a positioners set is coordinated, the more information its corresponding spectrograph receives during an observation. The complete coordination problem of positioners sets is studied in this paper. We first define the local and the global completeness problems and determine their relationship. We then propose a new artificial potential field according to which the convergences of a positioner and its neighboring positioners are cooperatively taken into account. We also discover the required condition for a complete coordination. We finally explain how the modifications of some of the parameters of a positioners set may resolve its incompleteness coordination scenarios. We verify our accomplishments using simulations.