Workshop Towards an Autonomous Materials Research Ecosystem

Autonomous and automated experimentation have demonstrated the possibility of accelerating materials research and development by orders of magnitude. However, the investment, in both time and money, to design and build these platforms has proven to be a major roadblock in their adoption. This cost is driven by the bespoke nature of these platforms, requiring redundant engineering and the complexity of handling multiple interfaces from multiple vendors. To mitigate these challenges, we propose the development of an autonomous materials research ecosystem. This ecosystem, defined by a set of community-driven standards, allows for these platforms to be rapidly constructed from off-the-shelf modular components designed and built by multiple vendors. Such standards may address sample management, instrument control and communication, data management, and algorithm and model integration. This workshop is intended to be the first step in achieving this vision for an autonomous materials research ecosystem. The goal of this workshop is to bring together stakeholders, both platform end-users and vendors, to determine the feasibility of such an ecosystem and identify concrete steps towards realizing this goal. Tasks include but are not limited to: (1) Creating a shared vision for the ecosystem, (2) Defining the scope of an initial set of standards, (3) Determining next steps including establishing working groups and/or consortia to move these ideas forward.