ARES OS 2.0: An Orchestration Software Suite for Autonomous Experimentation Systems and Self-Driving Labs

TL;DR

ARES OS 2.0 is an open-source orchestration platform that facilitates laboratory automation and autonomous experimentation across various scientific disciplines.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, modular, and language-agnostic software suite that simplifies building self-driving labs and automates experimental workflows.

Findings

Provides central control over lab modules and data management.

Enables easy integration of hardware, analysis, and planning modules.

Reduces time and effort to deploy autonomous experimentation systems.

Abstract

ARES OS 2.0 (hereinafter ARES OS) is an open-source software suite to enable laboratory automation and closed-loop autonomous experimentation. Its function is to orchestrate experimental actions and data handoff between lab equipment, analysis routines, and experimental planning modules through a service-oriented architecture. ARES OS is abstracted to apply to general experimental flows common in materials science, chemistry, and biology and related disciplines. The core of ARES OS provides central control over all modules, along with the heavy lifting of UI creation, data management, and experimental design tools. ARES OS modules communicate with the core software over protobuf and gRPC, allowing them to be language-agnostic and user-creatable. This allows users to easily implement modules that control experimental hardware, process collected data , or plan experiments to meet their specific research needs. ARES OS lowers the barrier to entry for researchers to build their own self-driving labs, allowing them to focus on scientific programming for their use case and reducing the effort and time needed to bring an autonomous experimentation system online.