The next generation of ground-based optical telescopes will employ increasingly large primary mirrors to achieve
superior resolution and light collecting abilities. Many of these large mirror surfaces will be segmented into an array of
hundreds of smaller mirror segments. The corresponding number of required sensors and actuators will be in the order of
thousands, which creates a challenging control problem to stabilize and align each segment from external disturbances - wind shake, gravity forces, thermal effects, seismic effects and induced vibrations from surrounding equipment and
telescope motion - so that the telescope's image quality requirements can be met. The use of a centralized control
scheme may be infeasible due to the large number of inputs and outputs of the resulting control system, while a
decentralize control scheme would lack global performance. An attractive alternative approach is an interconnected
network of distributed controllers that provide global control with a highly scalable design and implementation. A
segmented mirror can be considered as an interconnected system comprised of many similar discrete subsystems, where
each subsystem represents an individual mirror segments and its dynamics are coupled directly to its neighboring
segments. The resulting distributed controller network of controller subsystems are similarly coupled and working
cooperatively to achieve the desired global performance.
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