ARES™ Autonomous Experimentation Systems for Clean Energy Materials

The current materials research process is so slow and expensive, taking decades from invention to commercialization, that it may not impact 2050 CO₂ emission goals to mitigate disastrous impacts from human-driven climate change. The Air Force Research Laboratory pioneered ARES™, the first autonomous research system for materials development. A rapidly growing number of researchers are now exploiting advances in artificial intelligence (AI), autonomy & robotics, along with modeling and simulation to create research robots capable of doing iterative experimentation orders of magnitude faster than today. We will discuss concepts and advances in autonomous experimentation in general, and associated hardware, software and autonomous decision methods.<br/><br/>We will focus on the simultaneous generation of clean hydrogen plus sequestered carbon to lightweight transportation and construction materials through natural gas pyrolysis to hydrogen plus carbon nanotubes. For Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs), we show progress in autonomous and data science methods to understand and control the fundamental mechanisms that drive CNT synthesis via CVD.<br/><br/>In the future, we expect autonomous research to revolutionize the research process, and propose a “Moore’s Law for the Speed of Research,” where the rate of advancement increases exponentially, and the cost of research drops exponentially. We also consider a renaissance in “Citizen Science” where access to online research robots makes science widely available.