Design and performance of a dual drive system for tip-tilt angular control of a 300 mm diameter mirror

This paper presents the design, manufacture, and implementation of a dual-stage tip-tilt steering mechanism driven by ultra-high strain piezoelectric stacked actuators for coarse and fine motion control. The design of motion control systems often requires a compromise between range and bandwidth response. Consequently, for a given dynamic response, as range increases so too will following errors If advanced information is available, these errors may often be minimized by using feedforward techniques. In recent years, dual-stage systems which incorporate serially connected fine and coarse stages have demonstrated promising results. Related efforts (employing dual-stage methods) have addressed variants on designs using PZT elements, voice coils, or linear motors. The dual-stage uses a fine motion platform (with high frequency response and short range) to actively reduce following errors of the coarse platform which has a lower bandwidth response. This paper presents a dual-stage (also referred to as a multi-coaxial) tip-tilt mechanism with 6 degree of freedom (DOF) comprising two 3 DOF stages connected in series. The ultimate purpose of the mechanism is to position a 300 mm diameter mirror, hence it is referred to as a fast steering mirror. Also described is the nested control algorithm that is used to derive the drive signals for both the fine and coarse platforms. The algorithm provides a method by which the fine platform is actively driven to a commanded offset (usually its mid-range setting) by the coarse platform. Concurrently, the fine platform actively responds to the demand to reduce rapidly changing following errors. Finally, an experimental program is overviewed to assess the closed loop response for the fine, coarse, and dual-stage controllers. In one experiment, a sinusoidal input of amplitude ±300 μrad was employed at 10 Hz. The coarse controller generated a following error up to ±100 μrad at 10 Hz. In contrast, the dual-stage mechanism equipping both the coarse and fine controller reduced the following error to ±5 μrad. Frequency response plots of the closed loop control system are also presented and, with further optimization, indicate potential bandwidth improvements with small following errors and minimal phase lags up to 70 Hz.