First laboratory demonstration of closed-loop Kalman based optimal control for vibration filtering and simplified MCAO

Abstract

Classic Adaptive Optics (AO) is now successfully implemented on a growing number of ground-based imaging systems. Nevertheless some limitations are still to cope with. First, the AO standard control laws are unable to easily handle vibrations. In the particular case of eXtreme AO (XAO), which requires a highly efficient AO, these vibrations can thus be much penalizing. We have previously shown that a Kalman based control law can provide both an efficient correction of the turbulence and a strong vibration filtering. Second, anisoplanatism effects lead to a small corrected field of view. Multi-Conjugate AO (MCAO) is a promising concept that should increase significantly this field of view. We have shown numerically that MCAO correction can be highly improved by optimal control based on a Kalman filter. This article presents the first laboratory demonstration of these two concepts. We use a classic AO bench available at Onera with a deformable mirror (DM) in the pupil and a Shack-Hartmann Wave Front Sensor (WFS) pointing at an on-axis guide-star. The turbulence is produced by a rotating phase screen in altitude. First, this AO configuration is used to validate the ability of our control approach to filter out system vibrations and improve the overall performance of the AO closed-loop, compared to classic controllers. The consequences on the RTC design of an XAO system is discussed. Then, we optimize the correction for an off-axis star although the WFS still points at the on-axis star. This Off-Axis AO (OAAO) can be seen as a first step towards MCAO or Multi-Object AO in a simplified configuration. It proves the ability of our control law to estimate the turbulence in altitude and correct in the direction of interest. We describe the off-axis correction tests performed in a dynamic mode (closed-loop) using our Kalman based control. We present the evolution of the off-axis correction according to the angular separation between the stars. A highly significant improvement in performance is demonstrated.