Next-Generation Experimentation with Self-Driving Laboratories

The ever-growing demand for advanced functional materials requires disruption of conventional approaches to experimentation and acceleration of the discovery process. State-of-the-art approaches to scientific discovery are inherently slow, capital intensive, and have arguably reached a plateau. Significant advances are possible when rethinking and redesigning the traditional experimentation process. Self-driving laboratories promise to substantially accelerate the discovery process by augmenting automated experimentation platforms with artificial intelligence (AI). AI methods actively search for promising experimental procedures by hypothesizing about their outcomes based on previous experiments. This feedback loop is crucial to reduce the number of experiments needed for discovery. Supplying automated platforms with AI enables self-driving laboratories to fully embrace the vision of autonomous experimentation.