An AI-powered lab partner

Chemistry research often involves a lot of recurring tasks: set up reactions, check to see if they worked, make some tweaks to the conditions, rinse, and repeat. Andrew I. Cooper and his team at the University of Liverpool are working to create a future where chemists can pass off routine tasks to robots , speeding up the process of discovery and freeing up human brain space for bigger-picture planning. The latest iteration of their robo-chemist combines a mobile robot arm with an AI algorithm, resulting in a synthesis bot that can drive itself around the lab to carry out organic reactions, analyze the products, and use the data to make decisions much like a human chemist would ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08173-7 ). “Once the objectives are set, the system is fully autonomous,” says Cooper in an email to C&EN. The researchers made two bots and put them to work