Authors

Thomas Ruppel, Oliver Sawodny

Affiliations

Insitute for System Dynamics, University of Stuttgart

Abstract

With an increasing demand for high spatial resolution and fast temporal response of AO components for ELTs, the need for actively controlled, electronically damped deformable mirrors is evident. With typically more than 1000 actuators and collocated sensors, the evolving multi-input multi-output control task for shaping the deformable mirror requires sophisticated control concepts. Although global position control of the mirror would be the most promising solution, the computational complexity for high order spatial control of the deformable element typically exceeds available computing power. Due to this reason, existing deformable membrane mirrors for large telescopes incorporate local feedback instead of global feedback control and neglect some of the global dynamics of the deformable mirror. As a side effect, coupling of the separately controlled actuators through the deformable membrane can lead to instability of the individually stable loops and draws the need for carefully designing the control parameters of the local feedback loops.

In this presentation, the computational demands for global position control of deformable mirrors are revisited and a less demanding model-based modal control concept for large deformable membrane mirrors with distributed force actuators and collocated position sensors is presented. Both global feedforward and glocal feedback control is employed in a two-degree-of-freedom control structure allowing for separately designing tracking performance and disturbance rejection. In order to implement state feedback control, non-measureable state information is reconstructed by using model-based distributed state observers. By taking into account the circular symmetry of the deformable mirror geometry, the computational complexity of the algorithms is discussed and model reduction techniques with quasi-static state approximation are presented. As an example, the geometric layout of required sensor / actuator wiring and computational demands for glocal control concepts are presented for the Large Binoculare Telescope adaptive secondary mirror geometry with 672 actuators and sensors.