Challenges and Opportunities for Laboratory Autonomy (COLA) is a multinational group of engineers and researchers who discuss challenges facing autonomous science (including self-driving laboratories), identify opportunities to advance the field, and coordinate efforts to respond to these opportunities.
Participants come from national laboratories, universities, and industry in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Finland.
At the April 14–16, 2026 device integration hackathon, teams in Toronto and Dayton built SiLA 2 connectors, and the Dayton team ran the same devices under two orchestration engines, MADSci and ARES OS 2.0: a step toward interoperable device integration.
November 10, 2026
Online, every 2 weeks
November 29 – December 4, 2026
Boston, MA, USA
Dates to be announced
Europe
A shared specification for AI agents to operate physical devices.