Experimental evaluation of complete safe coordination of astrobots for Sloan Digital Sky Survey V

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a safe and complete coordination strategy for astrobots in SDSS-V, demonstrating its effectiveness through experiments and simulations in ensuring collision-free, efficient target assignment and movement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coordination method based on cooperative artificial potential fields that guarantees safety and completeness in astrobot movements.

Findings

The method ensures collision-free trajectories for all astrobots.

Optimal target assignment improves convergence speed and reduces oscillations.

The approach successfully handles various target distributions and potential collision scenarios.

Abstract

The data throughput of massive spectroscopic surveys in the course of each observation is directly coordinated with the number of optical fibers which reach their target. In this paper, we evaluate the safety and the performance of the astrobots coordination in SDSS-V by conducting various experimental and simulated tests. We illustrate that our strategy provides a complete coordination condition which depends on the operational characteristics of astrobots, their configurations, and their targets. Namely, a coordination method based on the notion of cooperative artificial potential fields is used to generate safe and complete trajectories for astrobots. Optimal target assignment further improves the performance of the used algorithm in terms of faster convergences and less oscillatory movements. Both random targets and galaxy catalog targets are employed to observe the coordination success of the algorithm in various target distributions. The proposed method is capable of handling all potential collisions in the course of coordination. Once the completeness condition is fulfilled according to initial configuration of astrobots and their targets, the algorithm reaches full convergence of astrobots. Should one assign targets to astrobots using efficient strategies, convergence time as well as the number of oscillations decrease in the course of coordination. Rare incomplete scenarios are simply resolved by trivial modifications of astrobots swarms' parameters.