Zooming-Free Hand-Eye Self-Calibration for Nanorobotic Manipulation Inside SEM

Nanorobotic manipulation inside Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) is widely used in nanomaterial characterization and assembly tasks. However, tedious and time-consuming hardware regulations, like axis alignment, are still critical and mandatory to keep the functionality of nanorobot systems. This article proposes a novel zooming-free hand-eye self-calibration method for nanorobotic manipulation inside SEM to circumvent the hardware regulation problem, which is applicable to a wide range of system configurations. The hand-eye relationship calibration method is based on the active incremental motion of the nanorobot without referring to expensive and complicated calibration patterns. Both perspective projection at low magnification and affine projection at high magnification are modelled, and unified by the image Jacobian matrix technique. With several times active calibration at different magnification factors in advance, the hand-eye relationship can be, thereafter, determined from the model at arbitrary status. The calibration model can be applied to both accurate SEM visual measurement and precision visual servo control. The corresponding methods regarding two-dimensional (2D) measurement, in-plane positioning, and constrained three-dimension (3D) positioning based on the proposed hand-eye relationship model are also presented in this article. Experiments show that practical contact between robot end-effector and silicon nanowire under 1500× is well established with standard deviation less than one pixel.