  Robotic experimentation accelerates data-driven discovery of new materials.
Whereas scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is commonly used for
atomic-level structural characterizations of materials, preparing high-quality
thin STEM samples depends on manual processes. This primarily limits the
opportunity of robotic experimentation of high-quality atomic-level STEM
analysis. Here, we demonstrate robotic fabrication of high-quality STEM samples
by using focused-ionbeam (FIB) with automation software. By the robotic FIB
operation, we systematically optimize the FIB final-thinning process for single
crystal Si, which has a major impact on the quality of atomic-level STEM
imaging. Aberration-corrected STEM imaging was performed on the optimized Si
samples, showing 55 pm resolution with quantitative reproducibility. We also
apply the same robotic fabrication to SrTiO3 and sapphire. Both samples yield
deep sub-angstrom atomic resolution in STEM imaging. Our success in robotic
fabrication of high-quality STEM samples may have a notable impact on
data-driven research of atomic-level materials discovery by STEM
