Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a fully autonomous mobile robot to assist them in their research. It’s has been designed to work uninterrupted for weeks at a time, using AI to analyse data and make decisions on what to do next. A flexible arm with customized gripper can be calibrated to interact with most standard lab equipment and machinery and it’s designed to be able to navigate safely around human co-workers and obstacles.

Countless precise repetitions? This is the perfect task for a robot, thought researchers at the University of Liverpool in the Department of Chemistry, and without further ado they developed an automation solution that can carry out and monitor research tasks, making autonomous decisions about what to do next.

Sources:

  1. University of Liverpool. https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project
  2. Pulido et al. (2017). Functional materials discovery using energy–structure–function maps, Nature, 2017, 543, 657
  3. Burger et al.(2020). A mobile robotic chemist, Nature, 2020, 583, 237

This autonomous mobile robot in University of Liverpool is designed to work alongside humans, in robotics’ capacity as laboratory chemist. The aforementioned project on mobile robotics laborarory chemist is funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design at the University of Liverpool via the Leverhulme Trust. The centre has its purporse  to bring together chemical knowledge with state-of-the-art computer science and automated technologies to develop a new approach to revolutionize the design of functional materials at the atomic scale.

This is an opportunity to undertake one of our new and exciting cross-disciplinary projects lying at the interface between materials chemistry and computer science. The ideal candidate would have strong problem solving and programming skills gained through a degree in computer science, chemistry, physics, mathematics or engineering.

Prior to the aforementioned opportunity, according to Pulido, the team at University of Liverpool has used computation to predict new functional materials from first principles that could then be discovered in the lab. More recently, they have developed the world’s first autonomous mobile robotic chemist that can carry out independent experiments using artificial intelligence (AI) , as confirmed by the scholar work of Burger et al.

Those scholar works are currently aiming to bring these concepts together: that is, to allow the robot chemist to conduct chemical reasoning, effectively putting a more sophisticated ‘brain’ in the robot. We will also explore ways in which human researchers can work with and interact with these robots. This project lies at the fascinating intersection of AI, computational chemistry, experimental chemistry and robotics, and the ideal candidate will have an interest and enthusiasm for all of these areas.

The successful applicant will work as part of a team of computational chemists, computer scientists, organic materials chemists, and roboticists to achieve the project vision.

The project on mobile robotics is open-ended and concept-driven, along with some clear starting points in terms of areas of chemical space that it is planned to search. Our success arises from a close working relationship between computational and experimental researchers within the group, which is part of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/leverhulme-research-centre/, where researchers with physical science, engineering and computer science backgrounds collaborate together closely.