PCL-Test Bed: PoLARIS: Polymer Laboratory for AI, Robotics, Informatics, and Standards

NSF PCL-Test Bed: PoLARIS: The Polymer Laboratory for AI, Robotics, Informatics, and Standards — Enabling Nationwide Access to Automated, AI-Guided Soft Materials Research Soft materials—including plastics, coatings, adhesives, and flexible electronics—are essential to modern life, from smartphones and medical devices to sustainable packaging and electric vehicles. Yet discovering new materials with improved properties remains slow, expensive, and largely manual. PoLARIS will transform this process by integrating powerful experimental facilities to create a remotely accessible, robot-operated laboratory where researchers across the US can design and run experiments without traveling. Using artificial intelligence to guide discovery, PoLARIS will accelerate the development of next-generation soft materials for clean energy security, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and national defense. The project will strengthen domestic supply chains, reduce dependence on foreign materials, and help American companies compete globally in industries worth over $200 billion annually. Through training programs and partnerships with colleges and universities nationwide, PoLARIS will prepare a skilled workforce to lead the future of American manufacturing and scientific innovation in an era increasingly shaped by automation and artificial intelligence. PoLARIS establishes a programmable cloud laboratory integrating more than twenty automated synthesis, processing, and characterization platforms with AI-driven workflow orchestration to enable closed-loop materials discovery at unprecedented scale. The node unifies high-throughput polymer synthesis robots—including the established PolyBot platform—with film processing, device fabrication systems, and multimodal characterization capabilities spanning thermal analysis, mechanical testing, electrochemical measurements, optical spectroscopy, and X-ray scattering at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source. Through the Modular Autonomous Discovery for Science orchestration framework and Globus data, compute, and workflow infrastructure, researchers submit experimental campaigns remotely while AI agents translate scientific goals into optimized workflows spanning synthesis, processing, and characterization. PoLARIS executes 100–300 experiments daily while maintaining comprehensive metadata and provenance tracking for reproducibility. Two science driver programs validate these capabilities while advancing fundamental understanding: (1) colloidal suspensions and composites, exploring dynamic bonding and jamming behavior across vast formulation spaces relevant to coatings and energy-absorbing materials; and (2) electronic functional polymers, targeting high-capacitance mixed conductors, electrochromic materials for smart windows, and environmentally stable semiconductors for bioelectronics. PoLARIS operates as an open national user facility providing equitable access to academic researchers, industry partners, and institutions currently lacking advanced laboratory infrastructure. Annual workshops, online training modules, and structured onboarding programs lower barriers to participation. All software, workflow templates, data schemas, and benchmark datasets are released openly under FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, enabling adoption by other laboratories and ensuring interoperability across the emerging national network of programmable cloud laboratories. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.