Fast and high-performance control for E-ELT optical instruments

Adaptive optics (AO) are used in large telescopes to compensate for disturbances in the atmosphere as well as vibrations of the telescope's optical components. With the increasing dimensions of telescopes, up to 39m for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the dimensions of AO systems are increasing such that the computational complexity of the controller prohibits an (unstructured) centralised implementation.

The goal of this project is to design, implement and validate a fast and high-performance control algorithm on multi-core off-the-shelf hardware to control a large-scale adaptive optics system for application in extremely large telescopes. The PhD student will evaluate several efficient AO control algorithms, including algorithms developed at DCSC, further optimise the computational complexity versus performance tradeoff, and implement and validate the method on a multi-core AO demonstrator system.

Project members:

  • prof.dr.ir. M. Verhaegen (Michel)
  • A.E. Brunner (Elisabeth)

Keywords:

Distributed and large-scale systems, Optics and imaging, Control of high-resolution imaging, Spatial-temporal large-scale systems

Sponsored by:

NWO