Agentic AI for Self-Driving Laboratories in Soft Matter: Taxonomy, Benchmarks,and Open Challenges

Abstract

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) close the loop between experiment design, automated execution, and data-driven decision making, and they provide a demanding testbed for agentic AI under expensive actions, noisy and delayed feedback, strict feasibility and safety constraints, and non-stationarity. This survey uses soft matter as a representative setting but focuses on the AI questions that arise in real laboratories. We frame SDL autonomy as an agent environment interaction problem with explicit observations, actions, costs, and constraints, and we use this formulation to connect common SDL pipelines to established AI principles. We review the main method families that enable closed loop experimentation, including Bayesian optimization and active learning for sample efficient experiment selection, planning and reinforcement learning for long horizon protocol optimization, and tool using agents that orchestrate heterogeneous instruments and software. We emphasize verifiable and provenance aware policies that support debugging, reproducibility, and safe operation. We then propose a capability driven taxonomy that organizes systems by decision horizon, uncertainty modeling, action parameterization, constraint handling, failure recovery, and human involvement. To enable meaningful comparison, we synthesize benchmark task templates and evaluation metrics that prioritize cost aware performance, robustness to drift, constraint violation behavior, and reproducibility. Finally, we distill lessons from deployed SDLs and outline open challenges in multi-modal representation, calibrated uncertainty, safe exploration, and shared benchmark infrastructure.