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In the design and development of end effector pads for silicon wafer handling robots, it is imperative that the static friction/adhesion force properties of the pads with respect to a variety of planar surfaces be characterized. In this work, the overall design, calibration, and data acquisition procedure of an instrument developed for performing these measurements on small (<10 mm × 10 mm) planar samples is presented. This device was used to perform adhesion/maximum shear force measurements on polydimethylsiloxane, a silicon wafer, and custom carbon nanotubes forest surfaces. The device was successfully able to measure an effective, mean profile adhesion force of 715 μN between a silicon wafer and a polydimethylsiloxane (2.768 × 10 -6 m 2 ) sample. In addition, a nonlinear maximum shear over normal force relationship was also measured between custom carbon nanotubes forest and the silicon wafer surfaces. The maximum shear over a normal force coefficient was found to decrease with increasing initial normal force. Currently, there are numerous devices for measuring normal/shear forces at the nano/micro- and macroscales; however, this device allows for the consistent measurement of these same types of forces on components with surface dimensions ranging from 0.1 mm to 10 mm.

Surface microscopy of individual biological cells is essential for determining the patterns of cell migration to study the tumor formation or metastasis. This paper presents a correlated and effective theoretical and experimental technique to automatically address the biophysical and mechanical properties and acquire live images of biological cells which are of interest in studying cancer. In the theoretical part, a distributed-parameters model as the comprehensive representation of the microcantilever is presented along with a model of the contact force as a function of the indentation depth and mechanical properties of the biological sample. Analysis of the transfer function of the whole system in the frequency domain is carried out to characterize the stiffness and damping coefficients of the sample. In the experimental section, unlike the conventional atomic force microscope techniques basically using the laser for determining the deflection of microcantilever's tip, a piezoresistive microcantilever serving as a force sensor is implemented to produce the appropriate voltage and measure the deflection of the microcantilever. A micromanipulator robotic system is integrated with the MATLAB(®) and programmed in such a way to automatically control the microcantilever mounted on the tip of the micromanipulator to achieve the topography of biological samples including the human corneal cells. For this purpose, the human primary corneal fibroblasts are extracted and adhered on a sterilized culture dish and prepared to attain their topographical image. The proposed methodology herein allows an approach to obtain 2D quality images of cells being comparatively cost effective and extendable to obtain 3D images of individual cells. The characterized mechanical properties of the human corneal cell are furthermore established by comparing and validating the phase shift of the theoretical and experimental results of the frequency response.

In this paper, a novel robust adaptive control method is proposed for controlling the Lorenz chaotic attractor. A new backstepping controller for the Lorenz system based on the Lyapunov stability theorem is proposed to overcome the singularity problem that appeared in using the typical backstepping control method. By exploiting the property of the system, the resulting controller is shown to be singularity free and the closed loop system is globally stable. Due to unavailability of system states measurement in practice, the controller is selected such that only one system state is needed. To overcome the problem of parameter uncertainty, an additional term to Lyapunov function is added and an identification scheme is adopted to have a negative definite Lyapunov function derivative. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers and approaches., ((c) 2010 American Institute of Physics.)

This paper presents the development and control of a laser-free atomic force microscopy (AFM) system for high-speed imaging of micro- and nanostructured materials. The setup uses a self-sensing piezoresistive microcantilever with nanometer accuracy to abolish the need for a bulky and expensive laser measurement system. A basic model for the interaction dynamics of AFM tip and sample in the high-speed open-loop imaging mode is proposed, accounting for their possible separation. The effects of microcantilever and sample stiffness and damping coefficients on the accuracy of imaging are studied through a set of frequency-domain simulations. To improve the speed of operation, a Lyapunov-based robust adaptive control law is used for the AFM XY scanning stage. It is shown that the proposed controller overcomes the frequency limits of the PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controllers typically used in AFM. Finally, the paper presents a set of experiments on a standard calibration sample with 200 nm stepped topography, indicating accurate imaging up to the scanning frequency of 30 Hz.