Evaluation of a Multi-rate Predictive Control Strategy for Adaptive Optics Systems

In this paper, we implement and evaluate the performance of multi-rate predictive control for Adaptive Optics systems. The multi-rate strategy yields considerable performance improvements in the case of low-magnitude guide stars and in the presence of wave-front sensor read-out noise, since the wave-front sensor exposure time can be increased to provide useful signal-to-noise ratios without having to limit the temporal bandwidth of the deformable mirror (as is the case in a single-rate control approach). Simulations performed on an end-to-end numerical Adaptive Optics simulation package are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the approach.