ADAPTIVE CONTROL OF WOOFER-TWEETER ADAPTIVE OPTICS

(Member) date AFIT/GE/ENG/09-33 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 sce-narios. 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, one using