Case of the Mondays

My adviser and one of the post-docs are out at a conference this weeks, so I'm practically alone in lab this week. Its hard to find motivation.

Today I aligned the target camera, so for the first time I have all my devices together in a single experiment: laser, DM, SLM, target camera, and WFS. Hey it only took a year!

I also finished the Simulink model that I can use to close the AO loop with any desired controller (although right now its using Simulink's integral controller block). To finish it off I added a block that reads images from the target camera and computes the image variance, although its easy to change that to any other desired performance metric.

Currently, the controller doesn't provide much improvement in the wavefront variance. I suspect this is probably because the phase is fairly flat to to begin with, and any aberration is relatively of high frequency and can't be corrected with the DM. Now that I have control of the SLM, the goal this week is to introduce (static) artificial disturbances and see how well the classical controller compensates. Next week I'd like to try some basic dynamic disturbances.

So the plan for this week:

1. Finish alignment, check tilt modes

2. Write a script to generate SLM poke matrix, begin applying static disturbances that result in a know slope disturbance.

3. Investigate performance of gradient descent algorithm using identified turbulence models.

4. Create Simulink model that implements gradient descent controller with an arbitrary performance metric.