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11/3/2023
Technology & Processes
Report
Robots speed up battery research
Empa researchers want to shorten the development time of energy storage devices with support from the robot platform "Aurora". To achieve this, Aurora is being trained to autonomously take over work steps in battery research and development. The project is part of the ETH Board's “Open Research Data” initiative, which supports digitalization and free access to research data.
Developing new concepts for batteries and exploring their potential is a lengthy process. "Our goal is to accelerate this process,," says Corsin Battaglia, head of Empa's "Materials for Energy Conversion" laboratory and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich.. This is where the robotic platform Aurora comes into play. Aurora takes over the fully automated and, in future, autonomous selection of materials, assembly and analysis of battery cells.
Aurora is intended to automate time-consuming and error-prone steps in research and development. Empa researcher Enea Svaluto-Ferro implements and trains the steps with Aurora. "While the robot weighs, doses and assembles the individual cell components with constant precision, initiates and completes charging cycles precisely and performs other repetitive steps, researchers can use the generated data to drive the innovation process forward," says Svaluto-Ferro.
Aurora is intended to automate time-consuming and error-prone steps in research and development. Empa researcher Enea Svaluto-Ferro implements and trains the steps with Aurora. "While the robot weighs, doses and assembles the individual cell components with constant precision, initiates and completes charging cycles precisely and performs other repetitive steps, researchers can use the generated data to drive the innovation process forward," says Svaluto-Ferro.
Autonomous and material-independent
In the future, Aurora is supposed to learn to work autonomously. Using Machine Learning, the AI could create mathematical models and decide which experiments should be performed and which materials and components should be considered for the desired battery application.
Since the platform can be used independently of materials, battery chemistry and generation, it could be used not only to research lithium-ion batteries, but also to test alternative sodium-ion batteries or batteries with a self-healing mechanism in the future, says Svaluto-Ferro. With the chemistry-agnostic Aurora, prototypes from laboratories, such as salt-water batteries, could be brought to marketability more efficiently and quickly, adds Battaglia.
Data tracking: Aurora meets AiiDA
The robotic platform is part of the ETH Council's Open Research Data initiative, which makes data freely available to the scientific community. It uses AiiDA, an open-source workflow management system. For communication between Aurora and AiiDA, Empa researchers are developing the appropriate software in collaboration with researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland (PSI). This makes Aurora the first robotic platform to be linked to the existing AiiDA system.For battery research, this means that the various process steps can be monitored and evaluated and data can be traced back to their origin.
