Decentralized control of a segmented reflector testbed

This paper outlines the ongoing research at the Structure, Pointing and Control Engineering (SPACE) Laboratory to achieve a decentralized control of a segmented reflector testbed. The main effort is concentrated on achieving the system´s top-level requirements including figure maintenance of the primary mirror to within 1 micron RMS distortion with respect to a nominal shape of the primary mirror, and precision pointing with accuracy of 2 arc seconds using the decentralized control technique. Having the time realization of the system at hand permits the implementation of such strict control requirements. Therefore, this entails system identification methods to achieve such a realization. In addition, by capitalizing on the characteristics of decentralized control, a fault-tolerant pipelined parallel processing design is developed. This approach features both improved load balancing for any number of processors and tasks and allows recovery from one or more processor failures.