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.

This project is a collaboration with the Delft Center for Systems and Control, and funded by NWO. 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. For this,  several efficient AO control algorithms including the multivariate spline-based SABRE and D-SABRE methods will be evaluated and optimized in terms of the computational complexity versus performance tradeoff. The newly developed method will be implemented and validated on a multi-core AO demonstrator system.