Anatomy of the (Future) Wet Lab
Dissecting what a chemist actually does, task by task, before deciding what a robot should take over.
Before deciding what a robot in a chemistry laboratory should do, we studied what the humans in one actually do: a task typology for synthetic chemistry, then a workload analysis of the people doing it.
The harder question came next. Not can this be automated, but should it be, and how. We are building a task allocation framework that sorts wet-lab work four ways: automate it outright, augment it so the robot carries the burden while the chemist keeps the judgement, defer it because the burden is too low to be worth the engineering, or preserve it because the work is valuable to the person doing it.
This is the part of automation research that usually gets skipped, and skipping it is how you build a robot nobody wants.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.