  The Australian Astronomical Observatory has extensively prototyped a new
robotic positioner to allow simultaneous positioning of optical fibers at the
focal plane called 'Starbugs'. The Starbug devices each consist of two
concentric piezoelectric tubes that 'walk' the optical fiber over the focal
plane to accuracy of several microns. Ongoing research has led to the
development of several Starbug prototypes, but lack of performance data has
hampered further progress in the design of the Starbug positioners and the
support equipment required to power and control them. Furthermore, Starbugs
have been selected for the TAIPAN instrument, a prototype for MANIFEST on the
GMT. A need now arises to measure and characterize 100's of piezoelectric tubes
before full scale production of Starbugs for TAIPAN. The manual measurements of
these piezoelectric tubes are a time consuming process taking several hours.
Therefore, a versatile automated system is needed to measure and characterize
these tubes in the laboratory before production of Starbugs. We have solved
this problem with the design of an automated LabVIEW application that
significantly reduces test times to several minutes. We present the various
design aspects of the automation system and provide analyses of example
piezoelectric tubes for Starbugs.
