Born-Qualified: An Autonomous Framework for Deploying Advanced Energy and Electronic Materials
For materials scientists and engineers, this is a conceptual proposal to address the 'valley of death' in materials development, but it remains a vision without empirical validation.
The paper proposes a 'born-qualified' framework for autonomous materials discovery that embeds manufacturability, cost, and durability constraints from the start to bridge the gap between laboratory optimization and industrial deployment. No concrete results are reported.
Autonomous science is transforming how we discover materials and chemical systems for advanced energy technologies. However, many initially promising systems never reach deployment. This "valley of death" stems from optimization that prioritizes laboratory metrics over industrial viability. We propose a new strategy: "born-qualified" autonomous development, which embeds manufacturability, cost, and durability constraints from the outset. This approach is enabled by four pillars, including the development of multi-objective metrics, causal models, a modular infrastructure, and embedding manufacturing in the discovery loop. Realizing this vision will require sustained, community-wide commitment, but the potential return on that investment is commensurate with the scale of the challenge.