At the core of the adaptive optics control algorithms of the ELT 1st light instrument METIS is a conventional command matrix that reconstructs the wavefront in the spatial domain by translating from wavefront sensor measurements to a modal space. The method behind the creation of this command matrix is perhaps a little bit less conventional: in a first step a reconstruction matrix is created using a virtual deformable mirror allowing us to use an optimal amount of information delivered by the wavefront sensor. In a second step, a projection onto the actual control space is computed permitting for the mis-registration between sensor and actuators to be treated disjunct from the wavefront reconstruction.

This talk gives an overview of this approach with a special focus on its implementation in simulation and the transformation into an optimised design for deployment on the GPU-based METIS adaptive optics soft real-time cluster. We will present the current status of the implementation and it’s integration with the hard real time computer as well as the simulation environment used to test the implementation.

Horst Steuer, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy