General description of the wireless miniature NanoWalker robot designed for atomic-scale operations

Abstract

The NanoWalker is a miniature wireless instrumented robot designed for high-speed autonomous operations down to the atomic scale. As such, it requires very advanced electro-mechanical specifications and complex embedded sub-systems. The locomotion is based on three piezo-ceramic legs that are modulated at high frequencies to achieve several thousand steps per second with computer-controlled step sizes ranging from a few tenths of nanometers to a few micrometers. Each robot has an onboard 48 MIPS computer based on a digital signal processor (DSP) and 4 Mb/s half-duplex infrared communication system. A special instrument interface has been embedded in order to allow positioning capability at the atomic scale and sub-atomic operations within a 200 nanometer surface area using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip. The design allows 200,000 STM-based measurements per second. In this paper, we describe the many sub-systems and the approaches used to successfully integrate them onto such a miniature robot.