Atomic force microscopes use a probe to interface with matter at the nanoscale through a variety of imaging or manipulation methods. A dual-probe atomic force microscope (DP-AFM) has been proposed for simultaneous imaging and manipulation. One challenge of DP-AFM is probe-to-probe contact, which may occur intentionally such as when locating one probe with the other. This work studies the stability for such interactions where the 1st probe is in the tapping mode (typically used for imaging) and 2nd probe is in the contact mode (typically used for manipulation). A state dependent switched model is proposed for DP-AFM. A theorem is proposed for uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) stability of switched systems under a sequence nonincreasing condition and applied to the DP-AFM problem.
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