General description of the wireless miniature NanoWalker robot designed for atomic-scale operations

Sylvain M. Martel; Lorenzo Cervera Olague; Juan Bautista Coves Ferrando; Stefen Riebel; Torsten Koker; Jeremy Suurkivi; Timothy Fofonoff; Mark Sherwood; Robert Dyer; Ian Warwick Hunter

doi:10.1117/12.444130

8 October 2001 General description of the wireless miniature NanoWalker robot designed for atomic-scale operations

Sylvain M. Martel, Lorenzo Cervera Olague, Juan Bautista Coves Ferrando, Stefen Riebel, Torsten Koker, Jeremy Suurkivi, Timothy Fofonoff, Mark Sherwood, Robert Dyer, Ian Warwick Hunter

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 4568, Microrobotics and Microassembly III; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.444130
Event: Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing, 2001, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

The NanoWalker is a miniature wireless instrumented robot designed for high-speed autonomous operations down to the atomic scale. As such, it requires very advanced electro-mechanical specifications and complex embedded sub-systems. The locomotion is based on three piezo-ceramic legs that are modulated at high frequencies to achieve several thousand steps per second with computer-controlled step sizes ranging from a few tenths of nanometers to a few micrometers. Each robot has an onboard 48 MIPS computer based on a digital signal processor (DSP) and 4 Mb/s half-duplex infrared communication system. A special instrument interface has been embedded in order to allow positioning capability at the atomic scale and sub-atomic operations within a 200 nanometer surface area using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip. The design allows 200,000 STM-based measurements per second. In this paper, we describe the many sub-systems and the approaches used to successfully integrate them onto such a miniature robot.

Citation Download Citation

Sylvain M. Martel, Lorenzo Cervera Olague, Juan Bautista Coves Ferrando, Stefen Riebel, Torsten Koker, Jeremy Suurkivi, Timothy Fofonoff, Mark Sherwood, Robert Dyer, and Ian Warwick Hunter "General description of the wireless miniature NanoWalker robot designed for atomic-scale operations", Proc. SPIE 4568, Microrobotics and Microassembly III, (8 October 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.444130

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