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A Self-driving Laboratory for Precise and Efficient Inverse Design of Functional Polymers 

Polybot is an AI-driven self-driving laboratory revolutionizing the inverse design of functional polymers through automation and robotics. By integrating robotic platforms such as Chemspeed, UR5e, and Tecan with RPL’s Workflow Execution Interface (WEI), Polybot autonomously handles tasks ranging from monomer recipe formulation to polymer synthesis, purification, and characterization. WEI’s Python-based tool coordinates complex workflows using ROS and TCP sockets, enabling seamless communication between robots for synchronized operations. Polybot’s physics-informed ML model accurately predicts electrochromic polymer properties, refining itself through active learning, and achieving high-precision results in just a few iterations. With this streamlined, fully automated workflow and open-access ECP informatics database, Polybot paves the way for collaborative, high-throughput polymer research and AI-driven material discovery. Project in partnership with Physical Sciences and Engineering and Center for Nanoscale Materials.