A research team led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has built and successfully demonstrated an automated experimentation platform to optimize the fabrication of advanced materials. The platform, called AutoBot, uses machine learning algorithms to direct robotic devices to rapidly synthesize and characterize materials. “By integrating synthesis, characterization, robotics, and machine learning capabilities in a single platform, AutoBot dramatically accelerates the process of screening synthesis recipes. The multidisciplinary team included researchers from the University of Washington, University of Nevada, University of California-Davis, University of California-Berkeley, and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The idea was to quantify the results so that they were usable by the machine learning algorithms.