Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a new approach for controlling adaptive optics (AO) systems for Astronomy. It promises to effectively cope with some aspects often hampering AO performance such as temporal delay or calibration errors. We formulate the AO control loop as a model-based RL problem (MBRL) and apply it in numerical simulations to a simple Shack-Hartmann Sensor (SHS) based AO system with 24 resolution elements across the aperture. The simulations show that MBRL controlled AO predicts the temporal evolution of turbulence and adjusts to mis-registration between deformable mirror and SHS which is a typical calibration issue in AO. The method learns continuously on timescales of some seconds and is therefore capable of automatically adjusting to changing conditions.

Hyperspectral (HS) cameras record the spectrum at multiple wavelengths for each pixel in an image, and are used, e.g., for quality control and agricultural remote sensing. We introduce a fast, cost-efficient and mobile method of taking HS images using a regular digital camera equipped with a passive diffraction grating filter, using machine learning for constructing the HS image. The grating distorts the image by effectively mapping the spectral information into spatial dislocations, which we convert into a HS image by a convolutional neural network utilizing novel wide dilation convolutions that accurately model optical properties of diffraction. We demonstrate high-quality HS reconstruction using a model trained on only 271 pairs of diffraction grating and ground truth HS images.

High power ultrasound permits non-invasive cleaning of industrial equipment, but to make such cleaning systems energy efficient, one needs to recognize when the structure has been sufficiently cleaned without using invasive diagnostic tools. This can be done using ultrasound reflections generated inside the structure. This inverse modeling problem cannot be solved by forward modeling for irregular and complex structures, and it is difficult to tackle also with machine learning since human-annotated labels are hard get. We provide a deep learning solution that relies on the physical properties of the cleaning process. We rely on the fact that the amount of fouling is reduced as we clean more. Using this monotonicity property as indirect supervision we develop a semi-supervised model for detecting when the equipment has been cleaned.

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Guided waves can be used to monitor structural health in industrial pipelines, and e.g. allow detection of accumulated precipitation on the surface of pipe. Propagation of guided waves in a tubular structure carrying possible fouling can be separated from a clean structure due to variation in wave propagation properties at the fouled area. In addition, multiple propagation paths around the tubular structure allow locating the fouled areas. In this study, we obtained dispersion curves of a tubular structure loaded with a local fouling layer of different thickness by using numerical simulations. We combined the dispersion curve information with simulated and measured timesof-arrival of guided wave propagation to second order helicoidal paths and used a Gaussian Process machine learning approach to estimate location of fouling on a steel pipe.

Context. The direct imaging of potentially habitable exoplanets is one prime science case for the next generation of high contrast imaging instruments on ground-based, extremely large telescopes. To reach this demanding science goal, the instruments are equipped with eXtreme Adaptive Optics (XAO) systems which will control thousands of actuators at a framerate of kilohertz to several kilohertz. Most of the habitable exoplanets are located at small angular separations from their host stars, where the current control laws of XAO systems leave strong residuals. Aims. Current AO control strategies such as static matrix-based wavefront reconstruction and integrator control suffer from a temporal delay error and are sensitive to mis-registration, that is, to dynamic variations of the control system geometry. We aim to produce control methods that cope with these limitations, provide a significantly improved AO correction, and, therefore, reduce the residual flux in the coronagraphic point spread function (PSF). Methods. We extend previous work in reinforcement learning for AO. The improved method, called the Policy Optimization for Adaptive Optics (PO4AO), learns a dynamics model and optimizes a control neural network, called a policy. We introduce the method and study it through numerical simulations of XAO with Pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS) for the 8-m and 40-m telescope aperture cases. We further implemented PO4AO and carried out experiments in a laboratory environment using Magellan Adaptive Optics eXtreme system (MagAO-X) at the Steward laboratory.Results. PO4AO provides the desired performance by improving the coronagraphic contrast in numerical simulations by factors of 3-5 within the control region of deformable mirror and PWFS, both in simulation and in the laboratory. The presented method is also quick to train, that is, on timescales of typically 5-10 seconds, and the inference time is sufficiently small (< ms) to be used in real-time control for XAO with currently available hardware even for extremely large telescopes.

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Accurate color determination in variable lighting conditions is difficult and requires special devices. We considered the task of extracting the visible light spectrum using ordinary camera sensors, to facilitate low-cost color measurements using consumer equipment. The approach uses a diffractive element attached to a standard camera and a computational algorithm for forming the light spectrum from the resulting diffraction images. We present two machine learning algorithms for this task, based on alternative processing pipelines using deconvolution and cepstrum operations, respectively. The proposed methods were trained and evaluated on diffraction images collected using three cameras and three illuminants to demonstrate the generality of the approach, measuring the quality by comparing the recovered spectra against ground truth measurements collected using a hyperspectral camera. We show that the proposed methods are able to reconstruct the spectrum, and, consequently, the color, with fairly good accuracy in all conditions, but the exact accuracy depends on the specific camera and lighting conditions. The testing procedure followed in our experiments suggests a high degree of confidence in the generalizability of our results; the method works well even for a new illuminant not seen in the development phase.