  The TAIPAN instrument, currently being developed for the Australian
Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory,
makes use of the AAO's Starbug technology to deploy 150 science fibres to
target positions on the optical plane. This paper describes the software system
for controlling and deploying the fibre-bearing Starbug robots. The TAIPAN
software is responsible for allocating each Starbug to its next target position
based on its current position and the distribution of targets, finding a
collision-free path for each Starbug, and then simultaneously controlling the
Starbug hardware in a closed loop, with a metrology camera used to determine
the position of each Starbug in the field during reconfiguration. The software
is written in C++ and Java and employs a DRAMA middleware layer (Farrell et al.
1995).
