Adaptive Control Of Woofer-Tweeter Adaptive Optics

摘要

Adaptive optics applies advanced sensing and control to improve the ability of optical systems to collect images through a turbulent atmosphere. The results of this research effort demonstrate that the combination of two recent approaches improves the performance of adaptive optics in directed energy and laser communication scenarios. The first approach is adaptive control, which offers improved performance over fixed-gain controllers in the presence of rapidly changing turbulence. The second approach incorporated into the study is a dual-mirror system. The two mirrors are a high-bandwidth, low- actuator-stroke (tweeter) mirror and a low-bandwidth, large-actuator-stroke (woofer) mirror. The woofer-tweeter combination allows for better compensation of the large-variance, high-spatial-frequency phase distortion generated by strong turbulence. Two different adaptive controllers are presented. The performance of the different adaptive controllers is compared to each other and to a traditional fixed gain controller. Simulations show that adaptive control of woofer-tweeter AO can increase the mean Strehl ratio by up to 20%.