Microrobot system for automatic nanohandling inside a scanning electron microscope

Current research work on the development of an automated nanohandling cell in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) is presented. An experimental setup is shown, in which two micro robots cooperate in the vacuum chamber of an SEM. A client-server control system that can integrate various microrobots and sensors has been developed and evaluated by automatic handling of TEM (transmission electron microscope) lamellae. The robots are controlled in a closed-loop way by using images from several CCD cameras and from the SEM. Algorithms for real-time processing of noisy SEM images have been implemented and tested. Finally, the experiment on automatic handling of TEM lamellae inside an SEM is described