- Daniel Jasper
Division Microrobotics and Control Engineering (AMiR)
Department of Computing Science, University of Oldenburg,
D-26111 Oldenburg
Germany
Contact: daniel.jasper 'at' kisum.uni-oldenburg 'dot' de
Force control for nanohandling inside Scanning Electron Microscopes
In addition to reliable microrobot positioning, applying a controllable
amount of force during a nanohandling or -assembly operation is essential for
the reliability of the operation itself as well as the resulting product. E.g.,
excessive force generated by a nanogripper could damage the handled object
and thus make the resulting product unusable. Insufficient force on the other
hand can lead to improper gripping and thus misalignment or loss of the object.
Integrating force sensors into nanotools, however, is difficult. Due to the
required small size, possible force sensing mechanisms such as piezoresistive
feedback are noisy, have a limited dynamic range, could be in
uenced if hit by the electron beam of a scanning electron microscope (SEM), and require tedious
wiring.
Due to the required visual feedback, most nanoscale operations are currently
performed in an SEM. With the approach presented in a previous work, it is possible to
obtain highly dynamic position information using the SEM as position sensor.
Simultaneously tracking a fixed point and the end of a well-known bending
structure such as a cantilever or a gripper jaw, the applied force can also be
measured with a high update rate (up to 1kHz) and high resolution (in the
nN range, but only dependent on the bending structure). Thus, it is possible
to integrate precise force sensors into virtually every nanotool used for SEMbased
nanohandling without complicating the tool's manufacturing process or
requiring additional cabling.
Preliminary tests with an electrothermal microgripper handling a multiwalled
carbon nanotube have shown that a simple PID controller is sufficient
to control the exerted force. The patterns required for position tracking could
easily be created on the gripper using electron beam-induced deposition. A
comparison to a cantilever with piezoresistive readout has shown the approach's
advantages in terms of noise and accuracy.
Test.
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