Democratizing self-driving labs through user-developed automation infrastructure

As self-driving labs become widely deployed in chemicals and materials research, interest in democratizing access to these platforms is growing. SDLs can be democratized by lowering their costs to increase accessibility and by creating systems that allow researchers to modify, extend, and share SDL tools to meet the needs of their science and contribute to the advancement of the SDL community. In particular, user-developed automation infrastructure is an important component of democratized SDL ecosystems. To advance community adoption of democratized SDL practices, we organized the “Democratizing Self-Driving Labs” workshop held at the 2024 Accelerate conference. As part of this workshop, the authors contributed to a demonstration of their user-developed automation infrastructure. 14 examples of custom built hardware, software, and workflows were shared. This workshop provided an opportunity for researchers to see user-developed infrastructure in action, learn about how they could integrate these projects into their work, and contribute to discussion about what is needed to advance the state of democratized SDLs. In this perspective, ten contributed examples of user-developed hardware and software from the workshop are highlighted. Despite a diverse array of projects, common motivations for pursuing user-developed infrastructure were cost savings and specification requirements that were unmet by commercially available products. Continuing to advance the state of user-developed automation infrastructure will require commitments to completing high-quality documentation for open-source hardware projects, pathways for materials researchers to learn hardware development skills, and more opportunities for researchers to share their infrastructure advancements, in addition to the scientific advancements that they enable.