• The development of a groundbreaking robotic laboratory will enable IMDEA Materials to harness AI and advanced automation in materials discovery.
• The new facility promises to greatly accelerate the discovery of new materials with a range of applications from medicine to sustainable plastics.

IMDEA Materials is set to host a unique robotics laboratory in Spain dedicated to the discovery of new polymer-based materials.

The lab, which will be led by the institute’s Accelerated Materials Discovery (AMD) research team, is being developed through the DIGIMATER-CM project, funded by the Community of Madrid and in association with five leading research institutes and universities.

Harnessing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), allows automated laboratories to accelerate the data collection and analysis vital to material and molecular discovery.

While robot labs have begun to appear around the world in recent years, their research has primarily been focused on small molecule discovery and on liquid-based materials synthesis.

“We are certainly not the first people to employ this strategy of using very precise robots that can be working 24/7 to generate data for AI tools in materials discovery,” explained IMDEA Materials Scientific Director and DIGIMATER-CM coordinator, Prof. Javier LLorca.

“What is cutting edge, however, is that we are going to be developing solid materials with real microstructures, materials that require industrial processing techniques”.

“Processing liquids is relatively simple. You just mix them, and you get a new material. Processing solid materials is much more complicated. You have to utilise injection and rolling techniques, you have to do things at a high temperature, and you have to optimise dispersal of the nanoparticles,” added Prof. LLorca.

“So, this will be a unique capability, not just in Spain but around the world, in processing materials for engineering applications”.

Prof. LLorca is coordinating DIGIMATER-CM through his association with the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), one of 6 research groups from the CAM collaborating on the project.

Along with IMDEA Materials, they also include the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), the University of Alcalá (UAH), CSIC’s Institute of Polymer Science and Technology (ICTP-CSIC) and the Madrid Institute of Materials Science (ICMM-CSIC).

In total, more than 30 researchers will be involved in the project. DIGIMATER-CM also incorporates four technology-oriented companies as associated partners: Tolsa, Yainfe, ADDvance Manufacturing Technologies and SecretAligner.

IMDEA Materials has already demonstrated the potential of the robotic laboratory’s capabilities through research funded by the MAD2D-CM project for the study of nanomaterials with advanced functionalities.

Put simply, robotic labs can accelerate materials design by automating experiments and collecting vast amounts of data quickly, which can then be used by AI tools to identify patterns and predict material properties, something human researchers could not feasibly achieve at the same scale.

“Depending on how optimised the robot laboratory is, and the kind of data you are collecting, we can significantly speed up the data collection process,” emphasised Dr. Maciej Haranczyk, leader of the AMD research group. “To give a more concrete example, what today is a four-year Ph.D. project could become a half-week job in a best-case scenario”.

The new laboratory will be modular in nature, allowing for a variety of materials testing and characterisation to be carried out simultaneously. Within the DIGIMATER-CM project, researchers will be developing biomaterials for sustainable plastics (ICTP-CSIC) and piezoelectric and smart materials (ICMM-CSIC).

IMDEA Materials’ Biometals, Coatings and Devices research group, led by Dr. Mónica Echeverry Rendón, will also be developing biomaterials for tissue engineering.

The UAH will synthesis the raw materials while the UC3M will lend its expertise in robotics and computer vision. Focusing on such a wide range of materials and applications was a deliberate choice made by those behind the project.

“We want to make sure this laboratory is robust in terms of the types of materials and the types of experiments it can handle,” said Dr. Haranczyk. “In order to do that, we need to undertake lots of testing to fully gauge the capabilities of this new technology, and we can’t do that without involving different research groups working in a range of fields”.

While already up and running in a prototype stage at IMDEA Materials, the fully operational robotics lab envisaged by the DIGIMATER-CM project will involve 5 robots working in a modular fashion. Its focus will be on polymer-based materials, structural and degradation characterisation and automated testing among other functions.

The DIGIMATER-CM project, “Digital strategies for autonomous discovery of materials for engineering applications” (reference TEC-2024/TEC-102), is funded through the call for R&D project grants carried out in collaboration between research groups from universities and research organisations in the Community of Madrid, under the modality of R&D activity programs in technologies.