A Smoothed Raster Scanning Trajectory Based on Acceleration-Continuous B-Spline Transition for High-Speed Atomic Force Microscopy

The scanning speed of atomic force microscopes (AFMs) is typically limited by the frequency of the triangular trajectory used in generating the raster scan. This is because the higher harmonics of the triangular trajectory have a tendency to excite the mechanical resonances of the nanopositioners incorporated in the AFM; thereby, introducing significant positioning errors. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel scanning trajectory smoothing method to enable high-speed raster scanning. The proposed method utilizes the acceleration-continuous B-spline to replace the backward path of the triangular trajectory for the fast axis. As a result, the advantage of uniform sampling along the forward path is preserved. The trajectory generation process is described in detail. A hysteresis compensation method is employed to improve the tracking performance of the scanner. Experiments conducted on a commercial piezoelectric tube scanner are presented to demonstrate the performance improvement delivered by the proposed method when compared with the traditional raster scanning method. It is shown that the proposed method enables a five-fold improvement in achievable scanning rate, from 10 to 50 Hz.