Self-driving labs accelerate clean energy technologies

Five years ago, UBC launched “Project Ada” – an initiative that positioned Canada as a leader in self-driving labs.

At that time, Natural Resources Canada had provided an $8M, 3-year grant to enable me and my collaborators, Prof. Jason Hein (UBC) and Prof. Alán Aspuru-Guzik (UToronto), to assemble a large, multidisciplinary team tasked with building “Ada”, the first self-driving lab for clean energy materials. 

Self-driving labs combine automation and machine learning to accelerate discovery. Our first Ada platform consisted of modules linked together to autonomously make and test thin films for solar cells. Because we used flexible automation to build this platform, we were able to readily pivot to explore different materials and applications.

To that point, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) recently awarded $200M to the Acceleration Consortium for self-driving lab development. CFREF’s support will provide a massive boost to further expand the global self-driving lab community, which Project Ada has played a key role in creating.

With strong demonstration of self-driving labs in academic research, I have expanded my attention to deploying self-driving labs in industry.

Members of the team that built out Ada are now working at my spin-out company, Miru , where they built a self-driving lab called “Adam” to advance electrochromic windows.  Adam has already discovered a color-neutral formulation that is to be used in Miru’s first commercial products. This is a crucial step toward real-world deployment of a material discovered by a self-driving lab. Miru is also building an AI-driven factory that will incorporate learnings from Project Ada to expand commercialization.

As I look back on how far our academic and commercial teams have come in the past years, I am immensely proud of our progress and the roadmap we pioneered that has enabled others to draw inspiration and pursue similar projects.

With many ongoing initiatives across academia, government, and industry in the self-driving lab community, I am very keen to see what the future holds for this growing field.

#SelfDrivingLabs #MaterialsDiscovery #Innovation