As part of the development of our distributed robotics platform, Telescope Connect is a test-bed for the study of the management of complex distributed robotic systems. Telescope Connect is a globally distributed network of robotic observatories, interconnected and orchestrated through a management platform distributed on the edge and the cloud, that Konica Minolta is developing. The design and architecture of the network has several aspects that make it a suitably generic environment to test and develop distributed intelligent networks.

In such a network, each robotic observatory has an autonomy of its own but the coordination of multiple observatories, and the storage of the acquired data is then centrally managed. The ultimate goal of Konica Minolta Laboratory Europe is to understand how these distributed ‘intelligent’ networks of robots function, how they can be optimised, and how similar technologies can be applied to different industry verticals, including digital manufacturing, digital healthcare and the workplace of the future.

This project is delivered in partnership with the Physics & Astronomy department of University College London.