An Intelligent AFM Scanning Strategy Based on Autonomous Exploration

To shorten the scanning time by focusing on the local scanning for such specimens as cells, this article proposes an advanced scanning strategy based on autonomous exploration, so as to detect the specimen in real time and achieve fast imaging for an atomic force microscopy. More specifically, fast raster scanning is first performed to locate the initial boundary point of the specimen. On this basis, a boundary tracking algorithm is proposed to construct the internal boundary of the specimen online through the autonomous exploration of the probe. Afterward, the boundary is expanded according to the internal boundary tracking direction, based on which a convex hull of the specimen is further constructed for the local scanning. Furthermore, the local slow scanning is performed for the specimen according to the generated scanning trajectory. Subsequently, unscanned areas in the sample can also be scanned by this autonomous method. Experimental results verify that the proposed method can achieve fast scanning while ensuring high-quality imaging.