Design and Control of a Sensor-guided Nanorobot

Miniaturization is a key step in the design of integrated circuits. Intelligent systems working on the microand nanometer scale, i. e. "nanorobots", would be of great value in this miniaturization phase. They would help optimizing the design and production process by acquiring local sample information and they even might work as nanotools to fix tiny imperfections. To create such a nanorobot we extended the capabilities of an atomic force microscope (AFM) beyond the standard surface-imaging with nanometer-resolution by adding additional controlloops for real-time signal processing. This local information control-loop enables our nanorobot to automatically search for specific features and track them. Here, we present setup and performance of our current system prototype consisting of a 2D linear motor as sample stage and an AFM-like local probe.