AI

The laboratory of the future makes its own experiments

At DTU, a new kind of laboratory will work around the clock without researchers in lab coats. Here, artificial intelligence devises chemical experiments and makes robots perform them, which could lead to new advanced materials for the green transition in record time.

A man is standing in a laboratory at DTU where he is setting some equipment. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørensen — Assistant Professor Andy Sode Anker is one of the researchers at DTU who is working on developing laboratories that can devise and carry out experiments autonomously. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørensen

Friday 19 June 2026

Sole Bugge Møller

The laboratory is quiet. No researchers in lab coats. No busy hands, no chatter. Only buzzing robotic arms that make chemical experiments all by themselves. It sounds like a scene from a sci-fi movie, but it’s actually becoming a reality at DTU.

“This is a whole new way of doing chemistry,” says Andy Sode Anker.

He is assistant professor at DTU Energy and heads a research project to develop ‘self-driving’ laboratories for producing materials for the green transition.

Today, researchers can take decades to develop a new material, but with self-driving laboratories, the process can be done in days and maybe even hours by getting artificial intelligence to read thousands of research articles, analyse data, and decide what experiments to perform. And it makes the robots do that—without breaks, holidays, and sick days.

“It’s a bit like a self-driving car. You give it a target destination which it will reach by itself by artificial intelligence controlling the engine and steering wheel, and it knows what to do when a pedestrian crosses the street. Just like we researchers set the direction for the ‘self-driving’ laboratory. The robots are the arms, while artificial intelligence is the brain,” says Andy Sode Anker.

This makes it possible to accelerate the development process of new materials, as the robot can perform far more experiments than the researchers in the same amount of time.

“We were able to control the robots ourselves, but artificial intelligence is much quicker at understanding complex and large data patterns than we humans,” says Andy Sode Anker.

Changes the properties of gold

Self-driving laboratories are still a relatively new concept, but Andy Sode Anker is one of the shining stars of the field. He has been on the ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ list and has received a new climate award called the Inflexion Award, which is presented to 30 of the world’s leading young researchers in pioneering solutions to climate change, and he is also part of the pioneering centre CAPeX at DTU. The centre is working to reinvent and accelerate the way we discover and develop materials for the green transition.

Andy Sode Anker and his colleagues are developing self-driving laboratories where robots handle the synthesis process itself and X-ray radiation experiments to characterize the atomic structure of a material.

“It was incredible the first time we saw that it actually works,” says Andy Sode Anker.

One of the first breakthroughs happened when Andy and his colleagues let the system work with gold. Not large gold nuggets, but in the form of nanoparticles—tiny lumps of the well-known metal, so small that they can change the properties of the material significantly. This means that gold can become an effective catalyst that accelerates chemical processes and creates the foundation for producing new advanced materials.

“Nanoparticles have far more surface area, so we may be able to use 1,000 or 10,000 times less of a material to make the same chemical reaction—and that’s quite a lot for an expensive material like gold,” says Andy Sode Anker.

Most importantly, the self-driving laboratory has supercharged the whole process. Normally, it might have taken the researchers two years to synthesize—i.e. to artificially manufacture—the gold nanomaterials, but the self-driving laboratory did it in two days.

“And a lot of the time was spent on setting up the laboratory because it was the first time, but in the long term I think we’ll be able to do the experiment in two hours,” says Andy Sode Anker.

Closeup of some equipment inside a materials laboratory at DTU. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørensen — The self-driving laboratory is housed at CAPeX—a pioneering centre that will accelerate the development of new materials for the green transition. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørensen

Facts

About CaPEX

The Pioneer Center for Accelerating P2X Materials Discovery—commonly referred to as CAPeX—is one of Denmark’s pioneering centres and its goal is to develop new advanced materials for, for example, catalysts for use in the green transition.

Headquartered at the Climate Challenge Laboratory at DTU Lyngby Campus, the centre is run in collaboration between DTU and Aalborg University (AAU) as well as national and international partners from the University of Copenhagen, the University of Southern Denmark, Aarhus University, Stanford University, Utrecht University, and the University of Toronto.

The sky’s the limit

This time factor will be essential if we are to solve some of the planet’s major climate challenges. This is explained by Professor Tejs Vegge, who heads CAPeX.

“It has typically taken 20 years to develop and run a large-scale production of the materials in the battery or the type of screen your mobile phone uses, but we can’t wait for that to happen in the green transition, so we try to develop new materials five to ten times faster. Artificial intelligence is essential here,” says Tejs Vegge.

Among other things, the CAPeX researchers are working to create algorithms that can learn directly from the experiments the robot is doing, and then propose completely new compositions that AI again makes the robot make. The researchers are also developing a kind of ChatGPT for material chemistry, which you can tell what material properties you want, after which AI makes suggestions for how the material can be put together.

The self-driving laboratory has used these methods to create a catalyst that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, so the hydrogen can be used to create sustainable fuels or chemicals, for example.

“The self-driving laboratory has tested more than 1,000 different catalyst compositions and mixed up to five different metals, something which researchers would never do that by hand. We do not decide for it what to synthesize, it chooses the composition itself, and then it learns from the data and proposes new compositions that are better than what we had before,” says Tejs Vegge.

Foundation of civilizations

For the general public, ‘new materials’ may sound abstract, but for Andy Sode Anker, it is the foundation for how far humanity has progressed.

“Chemistry and materials are all around us. Materials define our society, and many civilizations are named after materials ranging from the Stone Age to the Iron Age and Bronze Age, and we now live in what many call the Silicon Age because silicon is everywhere in our digital technology, from computers to phones,” he says.

However, much of our technology relies on rare metals, which are not necessarily the best possible materials.

“Today, we use a narrow field of materials because it takes a long time to discover and research them. If we can quickly make new materials, it opens up some wild scenarios where we might be able to make a superconductor that can move power from one place on Earth to another in seconds, without it costing anything. It will completely change the way we think about electricity,” says Andy Sode Anker.

”We don’t have to be in the laboratory, but we have to manage the laboratory.”

Assistant Professor Andy Sode Anker DTU

Portrait photo of Assistant Professor Andy Sode Anker. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørensen — Andy Sode Anker’s field of research is materials chemistry, machine learning, and robotics. He is in the process of establishing a self-driving laboratory at DTU. Photo: Thomas Steen Sørense

The world is your laboratory

In the Climate Challenge Laboratory at DTU, Andy Sode Anker shows two colleagues around the laboratory. They are visiting from the University of Toronto, one of CAPeX’s partner universities and among the world leaders in developing self-driving laboratories.

The new technology also provides completely new opportunities to collaborate with colleagues around the world and make use of their specialized research facilities.

“When you do chemical experiments manually, you are tied to the equipment you have available. I often need a synchrotron, which means I have to travel to the nearest facility and then spend days doing experiments. Imagine a world where everything is automated. Then I might have a colleague on the other side of the world who is an expert in spectroscopy and who can do some experiments for me. This opens up the possibility of doing much wilder experiments,” says Andy Sode Anker.

Humans still needed

However, there is still a long way to go. The self-driving laboratories have been criticized for using advanced robots and AI to make fairly simple chemical experiments.

“It’s true that we may not yet be doing experiments that humans wouldn’t be able to do manually, but the technology is moving really fast at the moment,” says Andy Sode Anker.

Soon, the self-driving laboratories will try their hand in the industry in a new collaboration with the Danish company Topsoe and the British AI company CuspAI. CAPeX will help produce new catalysts to develop sustainable aviation fuels.

“Sustainable aviation fuels are essential for reducing CO2 emissions in the aviation industry. The problem with aviation fuels is that they are extremely energy-rich and it is a huge challenge to make a sustainable alternative. Here, AI and self-driving laboratories can dramatically shorten the time from concept to catalyst and accelerate innovation cycles,” says Tejs Vegge.

Will scientists be obsolete in the future? Andy Sode Anker shakes his head.

“We don’t have to be in the laboratory, but we have to manage the laboratory. We will still need people to come up with a hypothesis or a new idea to take the research one step further,” he says.

Contact

Andy Sode Anker Assistant Professor Department of Energy Conversion and Storage Mobile: +45 21306867 ansoan@dtu.dk

Tejs Vegge Professor Department of Energy Conversion and Storage Phone: +45 45258201 Mobile: +45 51641787 teve@dtu.dk