WAVE-FRONT CONTROL ALGORITHMS AND ANALYSIS FOR A DENSE ADAPTIVE OPTICS SYSTEM WITH SEGMENTED DEFORMABLE MIRROR

We present the development and analysis of wave-front control strategi es for large-order adaptive optics systems that use a segmented deform able mirror as the correcting optical element. The system analyzed rep resents a substantial departure from most conventional adaptive optics systems in that the feedback signal includes both the local wave-fron t tilt and the relative edge mismatch between adjacent segments. One o f the major challenges in designing the wave-front control system is t he large number of segments that must be commanded. A fast and nearly optimal method based on the local slope and edge measurements is devel oped for this system. Fast algorithms offering a massive degree of par allelism are also developed to permit realtime implementation of the c ontrol strategies on commercially available, low-cost, parallel archit ectures. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America