7.12.10

More stuff on the velocity estimation. I managed to run some disturbances on the experiments that originated from a state space model. Surprisingly, you can actually distinguish something that looks like "flow" in the resulting reconstructed phase measurements. As a bonus, the velocity seems to be relatively constant.

The velocity estimate from these measurements are less than what's predicted by putting the estimated phases (using the commands and the phase poke matrix) through the estimator, but just the fact that there's anything recognizable is a plus. I did, however, have to mask out only the center of the WFS image corresponding to the active region of the DM, everything outside of this is just distortion. Maybe something like this should be done in the AO loop as well.



Speaking of which, I really want to focus on getting the AO loop working in the experiment this week. So far I everything runs, but I haven't seen any improvement in the Strehl in either the Simulink experiment or simulation. A few things to try:

1. Compare predicted and actual disturbance measurements (w/ and w/o bias). This should pin down if the internal plant model is accurate. It should be after running n4sid on sample data. Theoretically, I think the MSE between these should converge at something like an exponential rate after the adaptive loop is closed.

2. Try different disturbance sources. Maybe the current SS system is just too close to white to be useful. Maybe try a simple FIR filter or different amplitudes.

3. Compute the optimal IIR and FIR filter using the known disturbance model and see if that makes any difference.

Getting this working, especially #3, is important. The stuff with the velocity and new SLM is just icing at the moment.