PNNL AutoLabs AI Speeds Robot Experiments 10x

A new agentic AI system called AutoLabs is helping scientists communicate with robots, significantly speeding up experiments. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed AutoLabs to translate experimental goals into robot-specific language. Here's the thing: setting up experiments on autonomous lab robots used to be slow, requiring weeks of back-and-forth between scientists and engineers. AutoLabs changes this by quickly generating instructions for robots. What's interesting is AutoLabs currently works with Big Kahuna, an automated robot used for studying battery materials. This allows researchers to perform 5 to 10 times more experiments than they could manually. The team published their findings and made the software available for other researchers. The bottom line: this development could lead to a new generation of AI-driven assistants, making scientific discovery faster and more accessible.