Self acting production of tip for atomic force microscopy

This article describes the problem of the automatic production of a tuning fork with a tip for atomic force microscopy (AFM). It contains hardware and software (image processing) description of a self acting machine developed to solve the problem. The image processing main goal is to measure distances between individual parts during the fabrication process. A camera with high resolution and macro objective is used to acquire images during the assembly process. For getting better results, we perform correction of the used camera distortion and its calibration. Together with proposed image processing methods we use the camera as an accurate distance sensor. So obtained data we then used to control the process. We implemented proposed image processing methods in C++ using Intel OpenCV library. The machine is able to produce the tuning fork with the tip with constant parameters, which is important for future work with the microscope.