Motion Control, Planning and Manipulation of Nanowires Under Electric-Fields in Fluid Suspension

Automated manipulation of nanowires and nanotubes would enable the scalable manufacturing of nanodevices for a variety of applications, including nanoelectronics and biological applications. In this paper, we present an electric-field-based method for motion control, planning, and manipulation of nanowires in liquid suspension with a simple, generic set of electrodes. We first present a dynamic model and a vision-based motion control of the nanowire motion in dilute suspension with a set of N×N controllable electrodes. Since the motion planning of a nanowire from one position to the target location is NP-hard, two heuristic algorithms are presented to generate near-optimal motion trajectories. We compare the heuristic motion planning algorithms with other existing algorithms such as the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) and A* algorithms. The comparisons show that the proposed heuristic algorithms obtain near-optimal minimum time trajectories. Finally, we demonstrate a single, integrated process to position, orient, and deposit multiple nanowires onto the substrate. Extensive experimental and numerical results are presented to confirm the motion control and planning algorithms.