AI-driven mobile robots cooperate to conduct chemical synthesis
AI-driven robots that can carry out chemical synthesis research to the same standard as a human - but much more quickly - have been developed at Liverpool University.
The 1.75m-tall mobile robots were designed by the Liverpool team to tackle three primary problems in exploratory chemistry: performing the reactions, analysing the products, and deciding what to do next based on the data. The work is detailed in Nature.
The two robots performed these tasks cooperatively as they addressed problems in three different areas of chemical synthesis, namely structural diversification chemistry, supramolecular host-guest chemistry, and photochemical synthesis.
The results found that with the AI function the mobile robots made the same or similar decisions as a human researcher, but these decisions were made on a far quicker timescale than a human, which could take hours.
In a statement, project lead Professor Andrew Cooper from Liverpool University’s Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory, said: “Chemical synthesis research is time consuming and expensive, both in the physical experiments and the decisions about what experiments to do next so using intelligent robots provides a way to accelerate this process.
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