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self-driving lab
also self-driving laboratory or SDL or autonomous laboratory or autonomous lab or autonomous experimentation
Definition of self-driving lab
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: a laboratory system that combines AI, automated instruments, and robotics to choose, run, analyze, and refine experiments in a closed loop toward a human-defined research goal
- The self-driving lab selected the next protein variants after analyzing the previous robot-run experiments.
- Researchers used an autonomous laboratory to explore a chemical design space without manually scheduling every reaction.
Origin & history
The term extends the idea of a self-driving vehicle to scientific experimentation. It became established in materials science and chemistry for systems that join machine-guided experiment selection with automated physical execution, and expanded into biology and industrial research as laboratory robotics improved.
Editorial references
Sources & further reading
- Development of Standards to Support a Modular and Autonomous Laboratory Ecosystem↗ Official Research Program · National Institute of Standards and Technology · 2024
- Self-driving laboratories in industry↗ Peer Reviewed Journal Focus · Nature Synthesis · 2026-10-08
- Grounding AI agents in biological reality: Building blocks for autonomous wet labs↗ Official Research Announcement · Google Research · 2026-10-16
Test yourself
Which of these is the meaning of self-driving lab?
Cite this entry
"Self-driving lab." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/self-driving-lab/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2026.