A Modular Software Haptic Interface for Teleoperated Nanomanipulation and AFM Probe Based Characterization of Carbon Nanotubes

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate a design approach, implementation and application of a software interface for operating haptic devices. The proposed interface is modular in nature and allows for the operation of independently developed encapsulated software modules coupled only via a directly accessed and mutually shared memory space. This allows for easy integration/addition or exchange of different types of haptic device software modules without the need of substantial time investments or extensive modification of the existing code. The paper demonstrates a realized concrete software interface design, implemented and tested with a nanohandling station for the characterization of carbon nanotubes (CNT) inside a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The paper describes the implemented software features and principle of operation of the interface as well as the experimental setup of the nanohandling station and results towards CNT characterization