The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller was initially a proof of concept design for a generic adaptive optics control system. It has since been developed into a modern and powerful CPU based real-time control system, capable of using hardware acceleration (including FPGAs and GPUs), based primarily around commercial off the shelf hardware. It is powerful enough to be used as the real-time controller for all currently planned 8~m class telescope adaptive optics systems. Here we give details of this controller and the concepts behind it, and report on performance including latency and jitter, which is less than 10~μs for small adaptive optics systems.
@article{arxiv.1010.3209,
title = {The Durham adaptive optics real-time controller},
author = {Alastair Basden and Deli Geng and Richard Myers and Eddy Younger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.3209},
year = {2010}
}