Mobile robots that assist chemists at the bench instead of replacing them.
Organic synthesis has barely changed in a century. It is still manual, still hazardous, and still the bottleneck between an idea for a molecule and the molecule itself. Most laboratory robotics has answered this with bespoke auto-synthesizers designed to remove the chemist.
RoboChemistry takes the opposite position. We build mobile collaborative robots that offer real-time physical and cognitive assistance to human chemists, reducing workload and exposure while leaving the science where it belongs. Doing that requires three things at once: a general schema for describing chemical procedures, task planning that gives a robot enough chemical understanding to generate its own assistance policies, and physical human-robot interaction safe enough for a room that is not built for robots.
An NSF Future of Work award, run with Daniel Szafir and Alessandro Roncone. The robot-assisted dialysis platform is the first published piece of it.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.
Carson J. Bruns