The laboratory is quiet. No researchers in lab coats. No busy hands, no chatter. Only buzzing robotic arms that make chemical experiments all by themselves. It sounds like a scene from a sci-fi movie, but it's actually becoming a reality at DTU.
"This is a whole new way of doing chemistry," says Andy Sode Anker.
He is assistant professor at DTU Energy and heads a research project to develop 'self-driving' laboratories for producing materials for the green transition.
Today, researchers can take decades to develop a new material, but with self-driving laboratories, the process can be done in days and maybe even hours by getting artificial intelligence to read thousands of research articles, analyse data, and decide what experiments to perform. And it makes the robots do that—without breaks, holidays, and sick days.
"It's a bit like a self-driving car. You give it a target destination which it will reach by itself by artificial intelligence controlling the engine and steering wheel, and it knows what to do when a pedestrian crosses the street. Just like we researchers set the direction for the 'self-driving' laboratory. The robots are the arms, while artificial intelligence is the brain," says Andy Sode Anker.
This makes it possible to accelerate the development process of new materials, as the robot can perform far more experiments than the researchers in the same amount of time.
"We were able to control the robots ourselves, but artificial intelligence is much quicker at understanding complex and large data patterns than we humans," says Andy Sode Anker.
Changes the properties of gold
Self-driving laboratories are still a relatively new concept, but Andy Sode Anker is one of the shining stars of the field. He has been on the 'Forbes 30 Under 30' list and has received a new climate award called the Inflexion Award, which is presented to 30 of the world's leading young researchers in pioneering solutions to climate change, and he is also part of the pioneering centre CAPeX at DTU. The centre is working to reinvent and accelerate the way we discover and develop materials for the green transition.
Andy Sode Anker and his colleagues are developing self-driving laboratories where robots handle the synthesis process itself and X-ray radiation experiments to characterize the atomic structure of a material.
"It was incredible the first time we saw that it actually works," says Andy Sode Anker.
One of the first breakthroughs happened when Andy and his colleagues let the system work with gold. Not large gold nuggets, but in the form of nanoparticles—tiny lumps of the well-known metal, so small that they can change the properties of the material significantly. This means that gold can become an effective catalyst that accelerates chemical processes and creates the foundation for producing new advanced materials.
"Nanoparticles have far more surface area, so we may be able to use 1,000 or 10,000 times less of a material to make the same chemical reaction—and that's quite a lot for an expensive material like gold," says Andy Sode Anker.
Most importantly, the self-driving laboratory has supercharged the whole process. Normally, it might have taken the researchers two years to synthesize—i.e. to artificially manufacture—the gold nanomaterials, but the self-driving laboratory did it in two days.
"And a lot of the time was spent on setting up the laboratory because it was the first time, but in the long term I think we'll be able to do the experiment in two hours," says Andy Sode Anker.
