Stable High Bandwidth AO Control with physical DM constraints

Adaptive optics (AO) system performance is hindered by the mechanical limits of the deformable mirror (DM), namely stroke limits, interactuator stroke limits, and mechanical resonance.The nature of the multi-in multi-out (MIMO) control system does not lend itself well to notch filters to combat the mechanical resonances, and the stroke limits introduce non-linearities to the system.The traditional method of ensuring stable AO performance is to provide sufficient gain margin (i.e. reduce the AO system bandwidth).Guidestar and UCLA are proposing a novel method of spatial filtering of the phase errors combined with innovative model predictive controllers and multi-channel adaptive filtering to optimize the control bandwidth within a spatial frequency domain.