The Nanorobotics Project

A large new nanotechnology research programme Nanorobotics - technologies for simultaneous multidimensional imaging and manipulation of nanoobjects (grant GR/S85696/01 and grant GR/S85689/01) is to be established at Sheffield University from Autumn 2004 funded by a Â£2.3Millon grant from the RCUK Basic Technology Research Programme. The programme led by the Engineering Materials Department of the University of Sheffield, will be a collaboration of project partners from Sheffield (project leader), Sheffield Hallam and Nottingham.

Many new nanotechnology research fields require a high degree of precision in both observing and manipulating materials at the atomic level. The advanced nanorobotics technology needed to manipulate materials at this scale, a million times smaller than a grain of sand, will be developed in the new Sheffield Nanorobotics group. The integration of different technologies to act as simultaneous real-time nanoscale "eyes" and "hands", including the advanced nanorobotics, high-resolution ion/electron microscopy, image processing/vision control and sophisticated sensors, will lead to the ability to manipulate matter at the scale of atoms or molecules.

The Nanorobotics programme will thus allow unique experiments to be carried out on the manipulation and observation of the smallest quantities of materials, including research into nanoscale electronic, magnetic and electromechanical devices, manipulation of fullerenes and nanoparticles, nanoscale friction and wear, biomaterials, and systems for carrying out quantum information processing.

The project's deadline is end of July 2009.

Controls of JEOL 3010 microscope

Workpackage 5: Intelligent nanorobotic Control

Demonstration of Lucas-Kanade tracker applied to high magnification video and low magnification video. The indenter is lost where it moves to fast for the tracking algorithm

The workpackage of the MMVL is to

provide real-time position feed-back for controlling the nano-indenter
- using input from S-Video- or alternatively Firewire-camera
- estimate x- and y-position of the tip
- estimate the depth of the tip using x- or y-image wobbling (this is a common technique for manually focussing on an object already)
User-interface for telemanipulation and automated tasks
Correlate AFM- with TEM-images

Further projects beyond the workpackage

assist in hardness measurements by applying optic flow estimation on TEM videos
offline measurements of video-data from indentation experiments (e.g. see this publication)
- estimation of drift
- estimate movement of tip
- determine object-boundaries
measure fix-point and accuracy of rotary drives

Project Outputs

Publications

M.Boissenin, J.Wedekind, B.P.Amavasai, J.R.Travis and F.Caparrelli. Fast pose estimation for microscope images using stencils. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE SMC UK-RI 5th Chapter Conference on Advances in Cybernetic Systems (AICS 2006), Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 7-8 Sept 2006.
D. Bhowmik, B.P. Amavasai, T.J. Mulroy, Real-Time Object Classification On FPGA Using Moment Invariants And Kohonen Neural Networks,Proc. IEEE SMC UK-RI 5th Chapt. Conf. Advances in Cybernetic Systems (AICS 2006), pp. 43-48 (2006)
M. Boissenin, B.P. Amavasai, J. Wedekind and R. Saatchi, Shape information: using state space to decimate templates. BMVA Symposium on Shape Representation, Analysis and Perception, London, 5 November 2007.
J. Wedekind, B. P. Amavasai, K. Dutton, Steerable filters generated with the hypercomplex dual-tree wavelet transform. 2007 IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (ICSPC), pp. 1291-1294, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.(2007)
B.P. Amavasai, J. Wedekind, M. Boissenin, F. Caparrelli, A. Selvan, Machine Vision for macro, micro, and nano robot environments. BMVA Symposium on Robotics and Vision, London, 14 May 2008.
J. Wedekind, B. P. Amavasai, K. Dutton, M. Boissenin, A machine vision extension for the Ruby programming language. 2008 International Conference on Information and Automation (ICIA), pp. 991-6, Zhangjiajie, China.(2008)
J. Wedekind, M. Howarth, J. Travis, K. Dutton, B. Amavasai, Real-time computer vision with Ruby and libJIT. Poster presentation, The 13th AVA Christmas Meeting, Bristol, United Kingdom.(2008)
anonymous submission(s)

Software

HornetsEye: Ruby-extension, integration of video-I/O libraries, fast generic array operations, nominee in final selection of Ruby Award
Custom software for telemanipulation, 2D recognition and tracking using Normalised Cross-Correlation, Lucas-Kanade tracker, and Connected Component Analysis (not published yet)