Accelerometer-Based Online Reconstruction of Vibrations in Extremely Large Telescopes

Abstract Recent efforts to improve imaging quality of extremely large telescopes are based on compensating for structural vibrations with a compensation mirror canceling out the optical pathway deviations caused by vibrations of the telescope structure. To drive this mirror, the displacement of optical elements has to be reconstructed online from accelerometer measurements. The goal is to obtain high reconstruction accuracy and good disturbance rejection in spite of low-frequency drift and high-frequency noise highly deteriorating the measurements. A reconstructor based on double integration and filtering, a disturbance observer and a novel reconstruction approach based on adaptive resonators are implemented on a laboratory test setup simulating typical telescope vibrations. The true displacement is measured with a strain gauge and serves as a reference for reconstruction accuracy.