About
Autonomous science, mapped and watched. A hand-curated reference to where self-driving laboratories are being built, who builds them, and what changes week by week.
The map places every initiative we can verify from public sources on a globe: national programmes, academic groups, commercial platforms and lab-OS vendors, each with its first public year, domain, maturity, scale, investment where disclosed, and the sources behind the entry. The list makes the same data searchable, the timeline shows how the field grew since 1980, and the watch records talent moves, new labs, funding and policy as they happen.
The landscape is maintained by DiscoveryLabNL, a Dutch initiative for a national AI-driven materials-discovery infrastructure, hosted within the TU/e Flagship Advanced Materials at Eindhoven University of Technology. We built it to understand the field we are entering, and we publish it because everyone planning a self-driving lab needs the same overview. DiscoveryLabNL ↗
What gets in
- A public, verifiable source: a paper, a programme page, a press release or a funding record. It is linked on every entry.
- Closed-loop intent: the initiative plans, runs or analyses experiments with automation and AI in the loop, or builds the software and hardware that lets others do so.
- One entry per initiative, placed at its home campus or headquarters; consortia at their coordinating site.
- Institutions and programmes, not individuals, and no claims about performance beyond what the sources state.
Entries are added as they are verified; the watch is updated weekly. To suggest a lab or correct an entry, open an issue on GitHub. The dataset is MIT-licensed and downloadable as CSV, Excel and plain text; please cite the map when you reuse it.