Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Satoru Masubuchi is a pioneer in the automation of nanotechnology, whose work bridges robotics, deep learning, and the assembly of van der Waals heterostructures. His key research areas include autonomous robotic systems for materials science, machine vision for two-dimensional (2D) materials, and the scalable fabrication of van der Waals superlattices. Masubuchi’s most transformative contribution is the development of an autonomous robotic platform that can search for and stack atomically thin 2D crystals to build van der Waals heterostructures—a task traditionally requiring painstaking manual labor. His 2018 paper on this system has garnered 296 citations, reflecting its impact on accelerating materials discovery. He further advanced the field by integrating deep-learning-based image segmentation with optical microscopy (162 citations), enabling computers to identify 2D materials with superhuman precision. His comprehensive 2019 review on exfoliation, searching, and stacking (80 citations) has become a go-to resource for researchers entering the field. Masubuchi’s work is notable for transforming a bottleneck in 2D materials research—the random shapes and positions of exfoliated flakes—into a solvable engineering challenge, paving the way for high-throughput, automated fabrication of novel quantum materials.