In biochemistry there are multiple vendors that sell semi-to-fully automated setups that do large numbers of experiments in parallel.
I have no idea what solar research experimentation looks like in detail, is it theoretically possible to build similar setups for that use case? Where exactly is the bottleneck?
This may be a problem of scale. biochem is a much wider field, and I guess, depending on what devices exactly you mean, a lot of it is usable in other bio fields (like https://www.faulhaber.com/en/markets/laboratory-automation/l... - the pictures showing a common general bio-lab scenario, there can be thousands of such assays to test)?
So it depends on if the same machinery can be used for more general material science research and testing work.
