Automated reflective optical system alignment: analysis and experiments

We previously demonstrated automated alignment of a multi-element reflective system using existing internal imaging components and model-based optimal estimation in simulation. Using multiple versions of Kalman filtering, we were able to consistently bring the linear misalignments from around 1 mm to < 5 μm and the angular misalignments from around 500 arcsec to < 6 arcsec. This paper presents our preliminary experimental results and further analysis on the system. Specifically, we conduct information-based observability analysis to investigate the multi-state coupling effect and to evaluate our algorithm design, which provides insight into future improvements. We also discuss the current error sources in the experiments.