Dealing with Complexity via Exploitation of Structure in Control Design

Michel Verhaegen

In this talk the control of an Adaptive Optics (AO) systems is discussed from a control point of view. The complexity of the future plans of new telescope designs lead to challenging and interesting control design problems. An Adaptive Optics system aims at correcting the blurring due to atmospheric turbulence of an image of an astronomical object captured with a ground-based telescope. After a brief review of the state of the art in control of AO systems, the use of elementary control engineering principles is highlighted to understand and improve this existing approach. The issue of closed-loop feedback controller design is made transparant by using the principle of Internal Model Control. The central issue in reducing the temporal wavefront error is the design of a feedforward prediction filter. Here a novel approach to perform spectral factorization form observations will be presented . Making use of the high-performance SLICOT software, the potential and limits of an implementation of this spectral factorization approach in the time domain are investigated.