Vision-Guidance of Micro- and Nanorobots

This paper presents a selection of image processing methods and algorithms, which are needed to enable the reliable automation of robotic tasks at the micro and nanoscale. Application examples are automatic assembly of new nanoscale electronic elements or automatic testing of material properties. Due to the very small object dimensions targeted here, the scanning electron microscope is the appropriate image sensor. The methods described in this paper can be categorized into procedures of object recognition and object tracking. Object recognition deals with the problem of finding and labeling nanoscale objects in an image scene, whereas tracking is the process of continuously following the movement of a specific object. Both methods carried out subsequently enable fully automated robotic tasks at the micro- and nanoscale. A selection of algorithms is demonstrated and found suitable.