Abstract
Image sensing at a small scale is essentially important in many fields, including microsample observation, defect inspection, material characterization and so on. However, nowadays, multi-directional micro object imaging is still very challenging due to the limited field of view (FOV) of microscopes. This paper reports a novel approach for multi-directional image sensing in microscopes by developing a rotatable robot. First, a robot with endless rotation ability is designed and integrated with the microscope. Then, the micro object is aligned to the rotation axis of the robot automatically based on the proposed forward-backward alignment strategy. After that, multi-directional images of the sample can be obtained by rotating the robot within one revolution under the microscope. To demonstrate the versatility of this approach, we view various types of micro samples from multiple directions in both optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, and panoramic images of the samples are processed as well. The proposed method paves a new way for the microscopy image sensing, and we believe it could have significant impact in many fields, especially for sample detection, manipulation and characterization at a small scale.
Highlights
Image sensing at a small scale is essential in many fields, such as for the MEMS device defect detection [1,2], precise manipulation [3,4,5], micromaterial characterization [6,7] and so on
The micro object is aligned to the rotation axis of the robot automatically based on the proposed alignment strategy
After the sample is aligned to the rotation axis of the robot, the sample is able to remain in the field of view (FOV) of the microscope during the rotation
Summary
Image sensing at a small scale is essential in many fields, such as for the MEMS device defect detection [1,2], precise manipulation [3,4,5], micromaterial characterization [6,7] and so on. Confocal microscopy is able to scan half-transparent objects layer-by-layer and construct a 3D image [8,9]; the dual-beam EM can provide 3D image information by an etching-scanning process [10,11]; the cryo-EM allows one to construct the 3D structures of protein at atom scale [12,13] These techniques have been successfully used in some specific fields, when it comes to multidirectional image sensing, these methods either destroy the samples permanently or have special sample preprocessing requirements. We test various types of micro samples under both optical and scanning electron microscopes to demonstrate the versatility of this approach
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