Automation

A sustained operation of the platform cannot be done without extensive use of automatic procedures. The automatic procedures are at different proximity levels with respect to the operator.

The most downstream procedure is at level of the AFM control itself. In principle it would be possible to completely control haptically the position and the force exerted by each tip on the sample. In reality, the slowness of the human response hardly hinders the open loop operations and mixed architectures have to be implemented to avoid crashing the tip on the sample. For example contouring the sample to perceive his shape is better done if the tip/sample distance is left to the automatic electronic of the AFM. The operator acts on X and Y and the electronics keeps constant the interaction and feeds back to the operator hands the height information.

 

Another downstream automatic procedure could be for example the automatic tracking of a signal for alignment and centring purposes. This could be for example the detection of the synchrotron beam by the measure of the photoemission of electrons from the tip, description of the beam shape and positioning of the tip on the centre.

Upstream automatic procedures are those procedures that have to be performed once the haptic recognition and action has been performed and a predefined procedure has to be started. After grabbing with a defined force a sample, one may want to displace it in the space keeping the same value of grabbing force. Alternatively, after grabbing one end of an object one may want to rip it apart with a defined sequence of increasing forces.

 

Clearly the automation tasks have to comply with the needs of haptics and vice versa: the two aspects have to integrate smoothly and the transition from haptic to automatic has to be progressive and delicate.