RoboMapper brings speed and sustainability to materials development
Researchers in the US have created RoboMapper, a robot that conducts experiments more efficiently and sustainably to develop new semiconductor materials.
The researchers have demonstrated that RoboMapper can rapidly identify new perovskite materials with improved stability and solar cell efficiency. The team’s findings have been published in Matter.
“RoboMapper allows us to conduct materials testing more quickly, while also reducing both cost and energy overhead – making the entire process more sustainable,” said Aram Amassian, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University (NC State).
Conventional materials research requires a researcher to prepare a sample and undertake multiple steps to test each sample using different instruments. This involves placing, aligning and calibrating samples as needed to collect the data.
Previous efforts to automate this process have relied largely on automating the assembly line with one sample per chip moving through the data collection process. According to NC State, this improves speed, but each of the steps is done with one sample at a time.
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