Autonomous laboratory is the integration of high-throughput robotic experimentation and characterization with data-driven model development to guide the search for targeted formulation and processing conditions.
While autonomous/self-driving laboratories have made great advances in pharmaceuticals, hard materials and organic small molecules, the development of such systems for polymeric materials is at a relatively nascent stage.
We have been developing an autonomous discovery laboratory, named Polybot, that allows us to rapidly go from a polymer material concept to realized manifestations of final, testable materials targeted at relevant properties.
In this talk, I will focus on the autonomous discovery of electronic properties of polymers. I’ll talk about the research conducted with our self-driving lab, Polybot, covering topics ranging from smart manufacturing to the discovery of electrochromic polymers and polymer device optimization.
Jie Xu is a scientist at Argonne National Lab and a CASE Affiliated Scientist at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Her research focuses on developing flexible, stretchable, and degradable polymer-based electronic materials for future electronics and energy-efficient applications. She also leads the development of a self-driving platform combining AI and modular robotics to accelerate electronic materials discovery (https://www.anl.gov/cnm/polybot).
Jie earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Nanjing University, specializing in nanoconfined soft matter, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford in stretchable electronics. She received the Materials Research Society Postdoctoral Award and is named to the MIT Technology Review’s list of Innovators Under 35, Newsweek list of America’s Greatest Disruptors as a budding disruptor, and 2023 Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Early Investigator Honoree by the American Chemical Society.