Abstract
Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) close the loop between experiment design, automated execution, and data-driven decision making, and they provide a demanding testbed for agentic AI under expensive actions, noisy and delayed feedback, strict feasibility and safety constraints, and non-stationarity. This survey uses soft matter as a representative setting but focuses on the AI questions that arise in real laboratories. We frame SDL autonomy as an agent environment interaction problem with explicit observations, actions, costs, and constraints, and we use this formulation to connect common SDL pipelines to established AI principles. We review the main method families that enable closed loop experimentation, including Bayesian optimization and active learning for sample efficient experiment selection, planning and reinforcement learning for long horizon protocol optimization, and tool using agents that orchestrate heterogeneous instruments and software. We emphasize verifiable and provenan