A scaled bilateral control system for experimental 1-D teleoperated nanomanipulation applications

In this work, teleoperated nanomanipulation with force feedback is demonstrated by using an atomic force microscope on the slave side and a haptic device on the master side. Three main topics are addressed that are especially relevant for teleoperation at these scales: transparency, impedance reflection according to human perception, and stability. The proposed passivity based bilateral control scheme provides a stable means of teleoperation with an adaptive force scaling factor according to impedance limits that can be set by the operator and as transparent as possible. As a result, a robust platform to perform teleoperated nanomanipulation on a broad range of materials is achieved. Performance of the resulting bilateral controller is demonstrated in experimental results for simple vertical nanomanipulation touching experiments on glass and polydimethylsiloxane substrates.