Improvement of the tracking accuracy of an AFM using MPC

Tracking a reference signal is one of the major problems of an atomic force microscope (AFM). This article presents the design and experimental implementation of a model predictive control (MPC) scheme, with a vibration compensator for achieving accurate tracking for an AFM at higher scanning rates. To evaluate the improvement in performance attained by this control scheme, an experimental comparison of its tracked signals against different reference signals at different scanning rates is conducted. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.