Control System of a Nanohandling Cell within a Scanning Electron Microscope

In this paper, current research towards an automated station handling micro- and nano-objects is presented. An experimental setup is shown in which two micro-robots are controlled. A client-server-based control system that integrates various actuators and sensors has been developed and tested. It has been adapted to work with sensor feedback from the main sensor, a scanning electron microscope (SEM). An estimation of the tilt angle of a 3 DoF rotational manipulator by vision sensor feedback is presented. Algorithms for real-time processing of noisy SEM-images have been designed and implemented. First investigations have been carried out for the extraction of depth information of objects and tools under the SEM, which is considered as being one main bottleneck problem for automated SEM-based nanohandling