Pointing and Jitter Control for the USNA Multi-Beam Combining System

Abstract

The ability to accurately combine energy from multiple low power beams on a specific target is critical to making directed energy weapons effective and practical. At the United States Naval Academy Directed Energy Research Center, a project is underway to develop a three beam combining system that employs fast steering mirrors (FSMs) for pointing and jitter control of individual beams. In the previous work, an adaptive H-infinity optimal controller has been developed to control a single beam using a beam position detector for feedback. This project will apply the H-infinity adaptive controller and other controllers to the multiple-beam combining system in a multiple-input, multiple-output feedback control environment. Instead of using a position detector, a high-speed video camera will be employed to provide centroid estimation and feedback for pointing control algorithms.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 10, 2013
Accession Number
ADA581865

Entities

People

  • Zachary M. Patrick

Organizations

  • United States Naval Academy

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Control Systems
  • Detectors
  • Directed Energy Weapons
  • Free Electron Lasers
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Laser Beams
  • Laser Weapons
  • Lasers
  • Measurement
  • Tactical High-Energy Lasers
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Video Cameras
  • Weapon Systems
  • Weapons

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Phased Array Antenna Design.
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy