ABSTRACT
It may be appropriate to consider the deformable mirror in an adaptive optics system as its “heart” because without its continuous operation the system ceases to function. In further analogy with human anatomy, the “mind” of an adaptive system is the control algorithm responsible for generating the signals that drive the deformable mirror. The set of commands passed to each actuator of a deformable mirror for each sample interval is generated from an estimate of the instantaneous wavefront. The nature of these estimators is the basis of this paper.
