Autonomous and AI-Driven Systems

Development of methods, tools, and platforms to demonstrate and enable accelerated material and product development workflows — Our work in Autonomous and AI-Driven Systems assembles our other efforts into a fully functional system. Such a platform enables us to develop our primary outputs of software and tools while also discovering possible pathways to the development of new materials. The Autonomous Methods developed in conjunction with this program can drive the experiments, drastically accelerating the research - often by orders of magnitude. The Automated Experimental Technology developed in conjunction with this program allows us to implement closed-loop autonomous systems, thus closing the research loop and allowing for the experiments to be performed more quickly and repeatedly.

A direct consequence of such autonomous systems is collecting the extremely valuable, but difficult to publish, dark data - the negative results from experiments. These are the results of experiments that were promising, but did not deliver the desired results. Autonomous systems, by their nature, are forced to collect these results and add them to their corpus of knowledge. These systems, therefore, also directly combat the positive results bias in the global scientific publication record.

Projects

• Autonomous Scanning Droplet Cell
• Autonomous MOF Synthesis 
• Autonomous Metallic Glass Prediction
• Autonomous Neutron Scattering
• Autonomous X-Ray Diffraction
• Autonomous Scanning Electron Microscopy