AutoRASOR: Autonomous Rapid Scanning Electron Microscope Operator

Abstract

Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is a foundational technique for characterizing material microstructure, which dictates many fundamental physical and chemical properties. With the rise of Self-Driving Labs (SDLs), samples are now synthesized in large batches, demanding equally high-throughput, autonomous characterization. Existing automated electron microscopy pipelines are task-specific: they detect pre-defined features, optimize known properties, or require prior knowledge of the sample, restricting each pipeline to the material system it was built for. We introduce AutoRASOR, a task-agnostic autonomous SEM pipeline that captures the multi-scale morphology of an unknown sample without domain-specific pre-training, fine-tuning, or human prompting. AutoRASOR embeds micrographs in real time with a vision foundation model (VFM), DINOv3, and selects regions of interest (ROIs) through two complementary policies: Latent Farthest Point Sampling (LFPS) and active learning on morphological ambiguity, which is the conditional variance of unresolved fine-scale features given lower magnification appearance. Active learning on ambiguity consistently captures more diverse and rare morphologies than random ROI selection, while LFPS reliably recovers the specimen's morphological distribution within a limited capture budget, tested both on real SEM micrographs and synthetic phase-field images. By shifting autonomous characterization from pre-defined, task-specific targeting of features to morphological survey, AutoRASOR generates information-rich multi-scale datasets for diverse downstream tasks. Without the need for domain-specific pre-training or prior material assumptions, this framework can be deployed out-of-the-box to characterize novel materials produced by SDLs.