DARPA – Request for Information – Advancing Autonomous Science for Biological Applications

DARPA’s Biological Technology Office is seeking information regarding the current state of autonomous science, particularly in biological domains, and on opportunities for investment to advance the field in service to national security and public benefit.

DARPA seeks innovative insights into

1. the current state of the art of autonomous biomedical science
2. the major challenges and opportunities of the discipline
3. where targeted investment could have the greatest impact in advancing autonomous science in service to the national interest.

Responses should address informatics technologies, physical technologies or both informatics and physical technologies for autonomous science.  In each case, a response must address at least one of the following research areas:

1. Current state of the art of autonomous science and transformational enabling technologies to advance that state of the art.
   • Key existing enabling technologies broadly transferrable across scientific workflows.
   •  Technologies in development that will be transformational in enabling autonomous science.
   • Metrics of success for judging the current state-of-the-art and emerging technologies to surpass it (eg throughput, reproducibility, power usage, continuous runtime, cost per assay, etc)
2. Key technical, organizational, or operational bottlenecks in deploying autonomous science at scale or in new domains.
   • Challenges to enabling rapid development and exchange of new autonomous workflows including equipment or assays that provide unique challenges to automation.
   • Challenges to interoperability between labs and exchange of data and protocols.
   • Measures of success in promoting more efficient, effective, and portable workflow development.
3. Application areas in which new investments could have the greatest impact and best demonstrate  the unique advantages of autonomous science to solve problems not amenable to conventional approaches.
   • Problems of national interest where autonomous science can achieve results infeasible via conventional science, including specific applications for national security.
   • Enabling technologies available or emerging to achieve those results.
   • Metrics for establishing improvement over conventional approaches.
   • Current commercialization strategies/businesses cases for future development of autonomous science.
4. Safety and security considerations in the operation of highly automated labs and ways these might be addressed, for example via simulation and/or AI digital twins or via formal verification.
   • Risks to safety and security in the operation of autonomous labs.
   • Current safeguards, system-level security, traceability, and other approaches to biosecurity.
   • Enabling technologies to resolve these risks.
   • Measures of success for safe operation.
5. New technologies, opportunities, and challenges for maximizing productive interaction between human operators and autonomous agents in hybrid human-AI workflows
   • Applications of national interest that can be achieved only by humans augmented by autonomous scientific facilities.
   • Key barriers to productive interaction of human scientists and autonomous laboratories or their AI agents
   • Enabling technologies to overcome these barriers.
   • Metrics of success by which to demonstrate the advance of human-machine partnering over unassisted human or purely autonomous systems.

Response are due 22 July 2026 via email to AutoSci-RFI@darpa.mil .

Document

RFI – Advancing Autonomous Science for Biological Applications – DARPA-SN-26-96