Towards Piston Fine Tuning of Segmented Mirrors through Reinforcement Learning

Featured Application Piston alignment of segmented optical mirror telescopes through an algorithm that learns by itself how to maximize a physical quantity of the system. Abstract Unlike supervised machine learning methods, reinforcement learning allows an entity to learn how to deploy a task from experience rather than labeled data. This approach has been used in this paper to correct piston misalignment between segments in a segmented mirror telescope. It was proven in simulations that the algorithm converges to a point where it learns how to move the piston actuators in order to maximize the Strehl ratio of the wavefront at the intersection.