ABSTRACT
The urgency of finding solutions to global energy, sustainability, and healthcare challenges has motivated rethinking of the conventional chemistry and material science workflows. Self-driving labs, emerged through integration of disruptive physical and digital technologies, including robotics, additive manufacturing, reaction miniaturization, and artificial intelligence, have the potential to accelerate the pace of materials and molecular discovery by 10–100X. Using autonomous robotic experimentation workflows, self-driving labs enable access to a larger part of the chemical universe and reduce the time-to-solution through an iterative hypothesis formulation, intelligent experiment selection, and automated testing. By providing a data-centric ion to the accelerated discovery cycle, in this perspective article, the required hardware and software technological infrastructure to unlock the true potential of self-driving labs is discussed. In particular, process intensification as an accelerator mechanism for reaction modules of self-driving labs and digitalization strategies to further accelerate the discovery cycle in chemical and materials sciences are discussed.