VOICE OVER: Meet the robot chemist – a mobile autonomous worker
that has been designed to offer a helping hand around the lab.
ANDY COOPER: We started the project around three years ago,
and we'd never worked with mobile robots before.
We've worked with automation, but the first few months were spent
really just learning how to drive the thing around the lab reliably.
What we've done, unusually, is to use a mobile system.
That has advantages because you can really drop it into an existing lab and,
without much modification, use equipment which is already there.
To some extent, if a human can use the equipment, the robot can use the equipment.
VOICE OVER: This robot helper has been designed by chemists at the University of Liverpool
to help them in their research into developing photocatalysts,
which are materials that help produce hydrogen from water using light.
ANDY: The robot communicates with a software control system wirelessly.
It needs to be wireless because it's moving around a large space.
The robot weighs out the solid catalyst. It dispenses the liquids. It shines the light onto the samples.
It measures the output, which is hydrogen, and based on this output,
the hydrogen emission from the experiment, it then makes a decision about what to do next.
VOICE OVER: Just like a human chemist, this robot needs to be able to adapt its workflow
based on the outcome of its experiments, and this requires a computational solution.
ANDY COOPER: If you work out the number of possible combinations of the components in the experiment,
it's something like 98 million, so the robot uses an optimisation algorithm
using a method called Bayesian optimisation to navigate that chemical space.
VOICE OVER: To help it work more like a human chemist, this optimisation algorithm is a type of AI
that gives the robot decision-making capabilities.
But unlike its human counterpart, the robot can run continuously,
so there's a balance to be struck between giving the robot too much freedom and restricting it.
ANDY: If you explore too much then you end up doing 98 million experiments and that's just not possible,
but if you exploit too much, if you optimise too greedily or too quickly,
you don't necessarily find the best solution.
VOICE OVER: During these experiments, the robot relies on its articulating arm to interact with lab equipment,
and at the end of this is a special gripper that allows the robot to pick things up and operate machinery.
To navigate the lab and to avoid misplaced stools or avoid collisions with its human coworkers,
this robot uses LiDAR, which is a bit like radar but uses lasers instead to map its 3D environment.
ANDY: On top of this laser scanning system, there's a force feedback calibration,
and what that is is the robot taps a cube which is located in a fixed space
and that then provides a six-position reference point.
VOICE OVER: The robot is programmed with the coordinates of equipment and instruments
that it needs to use, and each of these stations is marked with their own cubes.
This gets the robot closer to having the sort of positioning and control that a human would have
with their hands, which is essential when interacting with delicate glassware.
ANDY: It doesn't just move around according to a program.
It navigates and makes its choice to do the most optimal schedule.
Now, you could, in principle, do that with a human, but it's a pretty uncomfortable way for most people to work,
to be driven by an algorithm.
Bear in mind, the robot doesn't invent the experiment, doesn't design the experiment.
It doesn't come up with the hypotheses.
So, the robot is a tool to search the space, but we still need people to think of the problems to work on.
So, I don't see it as replacing jobs as this stage.
I see it as augmenting people's ability to do research.
VOICE OVER: And amidst the global pandemic, the robot has found compelling new potential
in maintaining lab work during periods of social distancing.
ANDY: We've now received a lot of interest on the technology in terms of how might
you restart laboratories while still operating a certain level of social distancing.
If you have a technology where you can load the system up
and then that takes three hours and then it works for eight days
or two weeks by itself then you can see possibilities there.
So, yeah, I'd be delighted if we can find some way to contribute to that.