Optimal Sensing/Actuation Strategies for Vibration and Acoustic Control of Airborne Optical Systems

This STTR Phase II effort will demonstrate that a blending of Optimally Distributed Sensing and Actuation (ODAS) with Adaptive Filtering and Disturbance Feed-forward (AFDF) techniques can simultaneously mitigate the impacts of Directed Energy (DE) system payloads on aircraft while improving the Acquisition, Tracking, and Pointing (ATP) performance of DE systems. The innovation is the integration and application of research in ODSA techniques with AFDF to coupled aircraft-flexible beam train applications. The ODSA techniques provide: a sensor-actuator suite to measure and mitigate disturbances to the aircraft arising from the DE system, disturbance signal representing the structural/acoustic modes disturbing the forward paths of the ATP system, and similarly derived sensor set/signal representing those structural/acoustic modes disturbing the ATP feedback paths. The ODSA derived signals are coherent with the beam control jitter induced by the respective modes and represent the dominate contributions of these modes. Thus, they are ideal for use with AFDF to simultaneously control and mitigate vibration/acoustic induced effects on the coupled aircraft-DE system.