Laser Beam Jitter Control Using Recursive-Least-Squares Adaptive Filters

The primary focus of this research is to develop and implement control schemes for combined broadband and narrowband disturbances to optical beams. The laser beam jitter control testbed developed at the Naval Postgraduate School is used for development of advanced jitter control techniques. First, we propose a least quadratic Gaussian feedback controller with integrator for cases when only the error signal (the difference between the desired and the actual beam positions) is available. An anti-notch filter is also utilized to attenuate a vibrational disturbance with a known frequency. Next, we develop feedforward adaptive filter methods for cases when a reference signal, which is highly correlated with the jitter disturbance, is available. A filtered-X recursive least-squares algorithm with an integrated bias estimator is proposed to deal with a constant bias disturbance. Finally, experimental results are provided to validate and compare the performance of the developed control techniques. The designed adaptive filter has a simple structure but shows good jitter rejection performance, thanks to the use of a reference signal.