The development of a semi-immersive haptic nanomanipulation system with selective degrees of freedom

In order for the miniaturization process of device fabrication to persist in accordance with Moore's law, it will soon be vital to possess the capability to accurately and predictably explore and manipulate structures on the atomic scale. While current Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPM), such as the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), possess the ability to image on the atomic scale, the process is cumbersome and real-time interactivity is limited. To combat these limitations, an interface is needed between the SPM and the scientist to facilitate the operation of scanning and manipulating nanoscale structures. Such an interface is often referred to as a nanomanipulator, and is often designed in such a way to incorporate visual technologies to relay the topographic nature of the sample and haptic technologies to allow force feedback interaction with the sample surface. Through this technology, a researcher should be able to effectively image and manipulate molecular or atomic scale samples in near real-time. However, this is not always the case due to the limitations imposed by traditional nanomanipulation systems. These limitations include high cost, inflexible architecture, inadequate visualization techniques, and simple haptic interfacing, which restrict the usefulness of the system to particular application areas only. This dissertation creates a fundamental extensible and scalable framework to address these problems and thus provides an ideal interface to scanning probe devices. The nanomanipulation system, NanoExplorer, developed from this framework integrates a low-cost AFM controller composed of several commercial-of-the-shelf-products (COTs), a wide range of haptic technologies, novel and comprehensive haptic rendering techniques that exploit force curve information obtained from the AFM scan, and an open source semi-immersive virtual environment coupled with realistic visualization algorithms. NanoExplorer effectively characterizes the surface topology and associated properties of nanoscale samples and permits near real-time control of the AFM for the purpose of intuitive exploration and surface modification.