Abstract

Autonomous science couples instruments, robots, data systems, and AI agents into workflows that plan and interpret experiments with progressively less human intervention, and a two-year community roadmap published in July 2026 set eighteen milestones for the field. The second Annual Autonomous Workflows Workshop was convened to write such a roadmap and, finding one already published, answered it instead. Over two days, participants from national laboratories, universities, instrument and platform vendors, applied research institutes, and federal program offices tested those milestones against what their own organizations run today. This report presents the resulting assessment, which rests primarily on the recorded plenary discussion. We find that the milestones closest to model capability have advanced while those requiring another party's cooperation have not, that decision-relevant state does not cross the laboratory boundary, and that cross-framework provenance applied to three deployed agentic workflows exposed a silent error in each. We argue that the binding constraint is ownership rather than coordination, because implementable proposals surfaced repeatedly and no organization held the mandate, the budget, and the staff to carry them. We propose ten candidate milestones for the gaps the roadmap does not cover, and we set out an investment agenda that includes the applied mathematics autonomous laboratories need.

Date

2026

Authors

Ben Mintz, Rafael Ferreira Da Silva, Gabriel Appleby, Sage Bauers, Laura Biven, Ryan Coffee, Ewa Deelman, Stephen DeWitt, David Elbert, Brian Etz, Maria Gervais, Tirthankar Ghosal, Amal Gueroudji, Ramya Gurunathan, Leslie Hamilton, Aisha Haynes, Howard Joress, Ravinder Kapoor, Frances Kilmczak, Ying Li, Benji Maruyama, David Marvin, Sal Nimer, Vincent Paquit, Christopher Petzold, Brian Prascher, Rahul Rao, Juan Restrepo, Josh Sarles, Ashley Shields, Woong Shin, Mark Stevens, Fred Suter, Michela Taufer, Jerry Towler, Draguna Vrabie

Issue

ORNL/TM-2026/4839

Publisher

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)