Adaptive distributed Kalman filtering with wind estimation for astronomical adaptive optics.

In the framework of adaptive optics (AO) for astronomy, it is a common assumption to consider the atmospheric turbulent layers as "frozen flows" sliding according to the wind velocity profile. For this reason, having knowledge of such a velocity profile is beneficial in terms of AO control system performance. In this paper we show that it is possible to exploit the phase estimate from a Kalman filter running on an AO system in order to estimate wind velocity. This allows the update of the Kalman filter itself with such knowledge, making it adaptive. We have implemented such an adaptive controller based on the distributed version of the Kalman filter, for a realistic simulation of a multi-conjugate AO system with laser guide stars on a 30 m telescope. Simulation results show that this approach is effective and promising and the additional computational cost with respect to the distributed filter is negligible. Comparisons with a previously published slope detection and ranging wind profiler are made and the impact of turbulence profile quantization is assessed. One of the main findings of the paper is that all flavors of the adaptive distributed Kalman filter are impacted more significantly by turbulence profile quantization than the static minimum mean square estimator which does not incorporate wind profile information.

Distributed Kalman filtering compared to Fourier domain preconditioned conjugate gradient for laser guide star tomography on extremely large telescopes.

This paper discusses the performance and cost of two computationally efficient Fourier-based tomographic wavefront reconstruction algorithms for wide-field laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics (AO). The first algorithm is the iterative Fourier domain preconditioned conjugate gradient (FDPCG) algorithm developed by Yang et al. [Appl. Opt.45, 5281 (2006)], combined with pseudo-open-loop control (POLC). FDPCG's computational cost is proportional to N log(N), where N denotes the dimensionality of the tomography problem. The second algorithm is the distributed Kalman filter (DKF) developed by Massioni et al. [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A28, 2298 (2011)], which is a noniterative spatially invariant controller. When implemented in the Fourier domain, DKF's cost is also proportional to N log(N). Both algorithms are capable of estimating spatial frequency components of the residual phase beyond the wavefront sensor (WFS) cutoff frequency thanks to regularization, thereby reducing WFS spatial aliasing at the expense of more computations. We present performance and cost analyses for the LGS multiconjugate AO system under design for the Thirty Meter Telescope, as well as DKF's sensitivity to uncertainties in wind profile prior information. We found that, provided the wind profile is known to better than 10% wind speed accuracy and 20 deg wind direction accuracy, DKF, despite its spatial invariance assumptions, delivers a significantly reduced wavefront error compared to the static FDPCG minimum variance estimator combined with POLC. Due to its nonsequential nature and high degree of parallelism, DKF is particularly well suited for real-time implementation on inexpensive off-the-shelf graphics processing units.

Fast computation of an optimal controller for large-scale adaptive optics.

The linear quadratic Gaussian regulator provides the minimum-variance control solution for a linear time-invariant system. For adaptive optics (AO) applications, under the hypothesis of a deformable mirror with instantaneous response, such a controller boils down to a minimum-variance phase estimator (a Kalman filter) and a projection onto the mirror space. The Kalman filter gain can be computed by solving an algebraic Riccati matrix equation, whose computational complexity grows very quickly with the size of the telescope aperture. This "curse of dimensionality" makes the standard solvers for Riccati equations very slow in the case of extremely large telescopes. In this article, we propose a way of computing the Kalman gain for AO systems by means of an approximation that considers the turbulence phase screen as the cropped version of an infinite-size screen. We demonstrate the advantages of the methods for both off- and on-line computational time, and we evaluate its performance for classical AO as well as for wide-field tomographic AO with multiple natural guide stars. Simulation results are reported.