Improving the tracking performance of atomic force microscope scanner with the modified rate-dependent Prandtl-Ishlinskii model

A hysteresis compensation method with the Prandtl-Ishlinskii model is presented to improve the tracking performance of the atomic force microscope (AFM). Due to the asymmetric and rate-dependent hysteresis nonlinearity in this work, a modified rate-dependent Prandtl-Ishlinskii model is then utilized to deal with this effect. Without the inversion calculation, a direct inverse hysteresis compensation method is adopted. Experiments results show that the compensated system is linearized. Afterwards, a proportional-integral (PI) controller is introduced to improve the tracking performance of the scanner of AFM. Comparative experiments with the conventional PI control are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control approach, based on the tracking performance and the imaging capability.