Towards autonomous battery materials and electrocatalyst research platforms

Enea Svaluto-Ferro^a, Graham Kimbell^a, Nukorn Plainpan^a, Kim YeonJu^a, Benjamin Kunz^a, Lina Scholz^a^,^b, Raphael Läubli^a^,^b, Maximilian Becker^a^,^c, Francesco Bernasconi^a^,^c, David Reber^a^,^d, Peter Kraus^a, Ruben-Simon Kühnel^a, Alessandro Senocrate^a, Corsin Battaglia^a^,^b^,^c^,^d

^aEmpa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Überland Strasse, 129, Dübendorf, Switzerland

^bETH Zurich, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Switzerland

^cETH Zurich, Department of Materials

^dEPFL, School of Engineering, Institute of Materials

Proceedings of MATSUS Spring 2026 Conference (MATSUSSpring26)

I4 Digital Discovery: From Energy Materials to Devices

Barcelona, Spain, 2026 March 23rd - 27th

Organizers: Shoichi Matsuda and Magda Titirici

Invited Speaker, Corsin Battaglia, presentation 415
Publication date: 15th December 2025

The development of advanced materials has been a major driving force behind technological innovation and plays a critical role in addressing global societal challenges. Breakthroughs in materials science are needed to combat climate change by enabling greener batteries and more efficient catalysts that convert carbon captured from the atmosphere back into fuels, chemicals, and other value-added products. Despite significant progress in predicting new materials with tailored functional properties using advanced materials modeling and machine learning, the rate of discovery remains constrained by the often time-consuming and resource-intensive experimental realization and validation of new materials. These observations hold especially also for the validation of battery materials and electrocatalysts, where the challenge extends beyond identifying individual materials, requiring materials to operate synergistically in combination with other materials in an electrochemical cell.

In my talk, I will provide an overview of our efforts to establish and validate the two automated high-throughput experimental platforms Aurora [1] and Ophelia [2]. Our battery robot Aurora automates electrolyte formulation, electrode balancing, battery cell assembly, and electrochemical cycling, while Ophelia enables automated, parallel assessment of electrocatalysts for CO₂ reduction with real-time gas and liquid product monitoring via online chromatography. Both platforms are supported by extensive open-source software that streamline the definition of experimental protocols, monitoring of experiments, and data analysis. I will further discuss our linked data structure, which relies on semantically annotated metadata aligning with the battery and electrochemistry domains of the Elementary Multiperspective Ontology, establishing a new reference for reporting of scientific data compliant with the FAIR data principles [3,4]. I will conclude with an outlook on our vision for progressing from automated to fully autonomous materials research platforms.

[1] E. Svaluto-Ferro, G. Kimbell, Y. Kim, N. Plainpan, B. Kunz, L. Scholz, R. Läubli, M. Becker, D. Reber, R.-S. Kühnel, P. Kraus, C. Battaglia, Toward an autonomous robotic battery materials research platform powered by automated workflow and ontologized findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data management, Batteries & Supercaps 2025, 202500151

[2] A. Senocrate, F. Bernasconi, P. Kraus, N. Plainpan, J. Trafkowski, F. Tolle, T. Weber, U. Sauter, and C. Battagliia, Parallel experiments in electrochemical CO2 reduction enabled by standardized analytics, Nature Catalysis, 2024, 7, 742

[3] N. Plainpan, S. Clark, C. Battaglia, BattINFO converter: an automated tool for semantic annotation of battery cell metadata, Batteries & Supercaps, 2025, 202500151(see also https://battinfoconverter.streamlit.app/)

[4] G. Kimbell, R.-S. Kühnel, C. Battaglia, submitted

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