Project Link: https://github.com/AD-SDL/WEI

Description: The Workcell Execution Interface (WEI) for Autonomous Discovery/Self Driving Laboratories (AD/SDLs)

About WEI

When I returned to ANL in the fall of 2023, I started full time as a roboticist and software developer in the Rapid Prototyping Lab. In the time I had been away at UMich earning my MS in Robotics, the lab had been busy, primarily working on this project: the Workflow Execution Interface, or WEI.

The principal purpose of WEI is to act as an orchestrator and central planner for the various instruments we were automating as part of the Self Driving Labs effort. In the year after starting, I spent much of my time working on improving the functionality of WEI: adding better state management, dockerizing and packaging the software, adding better helpers for easily automating instruments, supporting administrative actions like pausing and safety stops, and various minor improvements.

As of the beginning of 2025, we've started working on a successor project to WEI, the Modular Autonomous Discovery for Science (MADSci) Framework, to leverage everything we learned building and improving WEI while creating a more scalable and approachable toolkit for lab automation and autonomous discovery.