High-speed nanorobot position control inside a scanning electron microscope

Abstract

Closed-loop nanorobot control performance is a key challenge on the way to high-throughput nanohandling. Currently, the limited update rate, long latency and unpredictable jitter of tracking based on scanning electron microscope images are a major bottleneck for such closed-loop control. A new approach for high-speed position sensing relying on line scans of a scanning electron microscope is adapted into the control loop of a mobile nanorobot. Several evaluation measurements show the system's unprecedented performance in terms of speed, resolution and accuracy. In only 60 ms, the employed mobile nanorobot can be positioned with a precision of 20nm in multiple degrees of freedom.