The robotic line cooks were deep in their recipe, toiling away in a room tightly packed with equipment. In one corner, an articulated arm selected and mixed ingredients, while another slid back and forth on a fixed track, working the ovens. A third was on plating duty, carefully shaking the contents of a crucible onto a dish. Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, nodded approvingly as a robotic arm delicately pinched and capped an empty plastic vial—an especially tricky task, and one of his favorites to observe. “These guys can work all night,” Ceder said, giving two of his grad students a wry look.
Stocked with ingredients like nickel oxide and lithium carbonate, the facility, called the A-Lab, is designed to make new and interesting materials, especially ones that might be useful for future battery designs. The results can be…
