Real-time control of a segmented telescope test-bed

The control of large segmented telescopes is a challenging one due to the complexity and high order of the system. The high order dynamics lead to high order controllers that require more memory and faster computations for implementation. While this may not pose a serious problem for a small number of segments, as the number of segments increases the computational requirements are becoming enormous. A test-bed that simulates in real-time a large segmented telescope is used to test the performance and computational requirements of several control designs. Three decentralized control designs were selected for implementation. These include a decentralized state feedback proportional plus integral (DSFPI) controller, a decentralized output feedback proportional plus integral (DOPFI) controller, and a decentralized direct adaptive output feedback (DDAOF) controller. The DSFPI controller requires more memory space and computational power than the DOFPI and DDAOF controllers. The DOFPI requires less memory space and computational operations but it performs worst than the other two controllers. The DDAOF requires an acceptable amount of memory space and computational operations and has better performance than the other two controllers.