A robotic and high-throughput X-ray micro-computed tomography workflow

With the recent upgrades of synchrotron facilities and an increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-ready scientific datasets, there is a growing interest in high-throughput and automated experimental workflows to accelerate large-scale data-driven research. In this work, we demonstrate a fully automated data collection workflow for synchrotron micro-computed tomography experiment on soil cores on beamline 7-BM at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), operating without expert supervision. The automation integrates sample exchange, multi-position movement and data acquisition. A self-contained robotic arm system is designed for rapid and reliable sample exchange. It accommodates various sample types and can be readily deployed across multiple APS beamlines. Additionally, the beamline has recently upgraded the sample stage stacks to enable a large travel range and an efficient macroscope-based imaging system, enabling characterization of highly attenuating and large samples. This work establishes a foundation for future closed-loop, adaptive and intelligent synchrotron micro-computed tomography experiments.