Shared Autonomy.

Scientific research is rapidly shifting from manual experimentation to automated and autonomous discovery. Despite its promise, fully “lights-out” laboratories face two hurdles: the reality gap of primitive and fragmented physical interfaces, and the lack of meaningful human integration.

This workshop focuses on closing that gap through shared autonomy, experiments driven jointly by researchers and automated systems. We are convinced human expertise remains essential in automated laboratories, but that collaborative space needs to be deliberately designed.

We bring together people across physics, materials science, chemistry and biology who are building and operating automated and autonomous experiments. We leave autonomous hypothesis generation and pure data evaluation to standard AI-for-Science events, and focus on the interface between software and machines. The plan is to discuss robotic orchestration, instrument interoperability, and how humans and machines coexist in a laboratory. We want to discuss what works, what was attempted, and what failed.

The three-day schedule contains talks from academia and industry with enough time left for conversations and coffee.

Talks will be recorded (where permitted) and published after the event.

Where is Saarbrücken?

Saarbrücken sits at the geographic and thematic intersection of the major European automation efforts. We sit at the border of Germany, a two-hour train ride from Paris, next to Luxembourg. We love the diversity that happens when different fields and different countries work together to improve the state of the art.