Active control of adaptive optics system in a large segmented mirror telescope

For a large adaptive optics system such as a large segmented mirror telescope (SMT), it is often difficult, although not impossible, to directly apply common multi-input multi-output (MIMO) controller design methods due to the computational burden imposed by the large dimension of the system model. In this article, a practical controller design method is proposed which significantly reduces the system dimension for a system where the dimension required to represent the dynamics of the plant is much smaller than the dimension of the full plant model. The proposed method decouples the dynamic and static parts of the plant model by a modal decomposition technique to separately design a controller for each part. Two controllers are then combined using the so-called sensitivity decoupling method so that the resulting feedback loop becomes the superposition of the two individual feedback loops of the dynamic and static parts. A MIMO controller was designed by the proposed method using the H∞ loop-shaping technique for an SMT model to be compared with other controllers proposed in the literature. Frequency-domain analysis and time-domain simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed controller.