CameraMan - Robot Cell with Flexible Vision Feedback for Automated Nanohandling inside SEMs

This paper presents a concept for a nanohandling robot cell with flexible visual feedback that can work inside an SEM's vacuum chamber and enable fully automated nanohandling and assembly. Therefore, rail-based robots position miniature video microscopes to observe the process from different angles and with different magnifications. Image processing techniques can be used to recognize and track objects as well as three dimensional information can be obtained by stereo vision and by the microscope's focus. The mechanical feasibility and advantages of the CameraMan concept are analyzed with a prototypic implementation of a nanohandling robot cell. To control this highly non-linear system a self-learning controller is used, challenges for cooperatively controlling the multi-robot system are outlined and high-level automation is discussed.

[1]  Alois Knoll,et al.  Fully Automatic Real-Time 3D Object Tracking using Active Contour and Appearance Models , 2006, J. Multim..

[2]  Frank P. Ferrie,et al.  Active Object Recognition: Looking for Differences , 2001, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[3]  Yiannis Aloimonos,et al.  Active vision , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[4]  Mohan M. Trivedi,et al.  Depth extraction using a single moving camera: an integration of depth from motion and depth from stereo , 2005, Machine Vision and Applications.

[5]  Dan Harkey,et al.  Client/Server programming with Java and Corba , 1997 .

[6]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Visual servoing of a mobile microrobot inside a scanning electron microscope , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Shree K. Nayar,et al.  Shape from Focus , 1994, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[8]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Self-Organising Locally Interpolating Map for the control of mobile microrobots , 2006 .

[9]  Sven J. Dickinson,et al.  Qualitative tracking of 3-D objects using active contour networks , 1994, 1994 Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[10]  Subhashis Banerjee,et al.  Active recognition through next view planning: a survey , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[11]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Driving principles of mobile microrobots for micro- and nanohandling , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[12]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Automatic control system of a microrobot-based microassembly station using computer vision , 1999, Optics East.

[13]  Dan Harkey,et al.  Client/Server programming with Java and CORBA (2. ed.) , 1998 .

[14]  Sergej Fatikow,et al.  Real-time object tracking for the robot-based nanohandling in a scanning electron microscope , 2006 .

[15]  Eric Krotkov,et al.  Focusing , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[16]  Oliver Schreer.  Stereoanalyse und Bildsynthese , 2007 .

[17]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Kalman filter-based algorithms for estimating depth from image sequences , 1989, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[18]  Ruzena Bajcsy,et al.  Active vision for reliable ranging: Cooperating focus, stereo, and vergence , 1993, International Journal of Computer Vision.