From Automated Beamlines to Autonomous Science

Autonomous experimentation is emerging across materials synthesis, synchrotron and neutron characterization, real-time analysis, and scientific decision-making. Yet increasingly capable artificial intelligence does not by itself create autonomous science. Scientific user facilities must also provide machine-operable experiments, machine-readable and interoperable data and interfaces, persistent provenance across the experimental lifecycle, scientific capabilities that can be discovered and orchestrated across instruments and facilities, and access models compatible with iterative experimental campaigns. We argue that these infrastructure requirements should be treated as a coupled scientific design problem. Their value is not limited to higher throughput: reducing the latency between observation, interpretation, decision, and the next measurement can make metastable states, competing phases / phase coexistence, degradation, failure pathways, phase boundaries, and other difficult-to-access phenomena experimentally observable. Drawing on recent demonstrations in autonomous laboratories and advanced characterization, along with discussions from the 2026 Advanced Light Source Automation and Self-Driving Labs Workshop, we outline a practical progression from automated instruments to distributed autonomous discovery ecosystems that link synthesis, synchrotron and neutron characterization, computing, theory, and human scientific judgment.