Fast and reliable control of steering mirrors with application to free-space communication

After modeling a laser beam pointing system actuated by a piezo-electric fast steering mirror (FSM), an observer-based linear feedback controller is developed to correct the position of the laser spot communicated by the position sensing detector (PSD). The modeling and the control actions have been considered with and without the hysteresis effect induced by the piezoelectric actuators of the FSM. The design of the feedback is given through the solution of parametric matrix inequalities. It was found that the integral feedback design is very efficient in handling input and system uncertainty. The linearity of the observer-based feedback has facilitated both the real-time implementation of the control strategy and the proof of stability using dynamic-output feedbacks.