A-Lab—An Autonomous Laboratory for the Accelerated Synthesis of Novel Inorganic Materials

We will present the development and initial successes of A-lab: an autonomous facility for the closed-loop synthesis of inorganic materials from powder precursors. All synthesis and characterization actions in A-lab, including powder mixing and grinding, firing, characterization by XRD and SEM, and all sample transfers between them are fully automated, leading to a lab that can synthesize and structurally characterize novel compounds within 10-20 hrs of initiation. The A-lab leverages ab-initio computations through an API with the Materials Project, historical data sets that are text-mined from the literature, machine learning for optimization of synthesis routes and interpretation of characterization data, and active learning to plan and interpret the outcomes of experiments performed using robotics. Over 17 days of continuous operation, the A-Lab successfully developed synthesis routes for 41 novel compounds from a set of 58 targets that were identified using large-scale ab-initio phase stability data from the Materials Project and Google Brain. Synthesis recipes were proposed by natural language models trained on the literature and optimized using an active learning approach grounded in thermodynamics. Analysis of failed syntheses provide direct and actionable suggestions to improve current techniques for materials screening and synthesis design. The high success rate exemplifies the new paradigm of autonomous materials discovery and motivates further integration of computations, historical knowledge, and robotics into AI-driven, closed-loop platforms.