“Self-driving labs combine robotics, AI and advanced computing to design, make, test and analyze potential new materials in a loop guided by AI that learns from the experiments it has run and makes decisions about what to do next.

• Today they’re bespoke setups that mostly carry out relatively easy to automate experiments as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
• They’ve been used to optimize catalytic reactions, gleaning more information in five days than researchers typically can in six months, Abolhasani and his colleagues reported in February.
• They’ve also run autonomous experiments to more rapidly develop quantum dots and find a more sustainable way to synthesize nanoparticles.
• Last year, Google DeepMind and the self-driving ‘A-Lab’ at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported discovering and producing more than 40 new materials in an autonomous lab. (That result was called into question by a team of researchers.)
• An international team of scientists recently described how they combined AI-guided experiments happening in five labs located around the world to find 21 new candidate materials for organic solid-state lasers.”

From Axios.