Modeling and Distributed Control of an Electrostatically Actuated Microcantilever Array

This paper presents a basic model and control design of an array of electrostatically actuated microcantilevers that can be put to use for high throughput applications, such as, multi cantilever imaging applications in atomic force microscopy (AFM). We consider a model of infinite array which belongs to the class of spatially invariant systems, and design a H_infin distributed controller while making use of the information from only the immediate neighbors. The performance of this controller is tested via simulations on a finite nonlinear model of the system. Based on the achieved resolution and bandwidth, the device holds high potential for AFM applications in contact mode such as, indenting, pushing, cutting, and lithography.