A Review of Feedforward Control Approaches in Nanopositioning for High-Speed SPM

Control can enable high-bandwidth nanopositioning needed to increase the operating speed of scanning probe microscopes (SPMs). High-speed SPMs can substantially impact the throughput of a wide range of emerging nanosciences and nanotechnologies. In particular, inversion-based control can find the feedforward input needed to account for the positioning dynamics and, thus, achieve the required precision and bandwidth. This article reviews inversion-based feedforward approaches used for high-speed SPMs such as optimal inversion that accounts for model uncertainty and inversion-based iterative control for repetitive applications. The article establishes connections to other existing methods such as zero-phase-error-tracking feedforward and robust feedforward. Additionally, the article reviews the use of feedforward in emerging applications such as SPM-based nanoscale combinatorial-science studies, image-based control for subnanometer-scale studies, and imaging of large soft biosamples with SPMs. DOI: 10.1115/1.4000158