Liverpool’s robots with AI brains speed up chemical synthesis, outpacing human work

Researchers have developed AI-powered mobile robots for highly efficient chemical synthesis research.

Standing 1.75 meters (5.7 feet) tall, the robots address three main challenges in chemical synthesis: conducting reactions, analyzing products, and making data-driven decisions.

Working cooperatively, the robots tackled structural diversification, supramolecular host-guest chemistry, and photochemical synthesis.

According to the team at the University of Liverpool, their AI allowed them to make decisions similar to human researchers but much more quickly—cutting hours of work into a fraction of the time.

Automating chemistry decisions

Chemical synthesis research is time-consuming and costly. It involves physical experiments and decisions about what experiments to conduct next. Intelligent robots offer a solution to accelerate this process.

While many associate robots with tasks like mixing solutions or heating reactions, the decision-making aspect can be equally time-consuming. This is especially true in exploratory chemistry, where outcomes are uncertain, and researchers must make nuanced decisions based on multiple datasets. Although challenging for AI, this task is particularly demanding for human chemists.

to researchers, one of the main issues in exploratory chemistry is decision-making. A researcher might, for instance, conduct a number of trial reactions before deciding to scale up only those that produce intriguing compounds or good reaction yields.

This is challenging for AI to accomplish because several factors can influence whether something is "interesting" and worthwhile to pursue, such as the reaction product's originality or the expense and difficulty of the synthetic path.

"When I did my PhD, I did many of the chemical reactions by hand. Often, collecting and figuring out the analytical data took just as long as setting up the experiments. This data analysis problem becomes even more severe when you start to automate the chemistry. You can end up drowning in data," said Dr Sriram Vijayakrishnan, a former University of Liverpool PhD student and the Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Chemistry who led the synthesis work, in a statement .

Advancing chemical research

The researchers addressed this challenge by developing AI logic for the robots, enabling them to process analytical datasets and make autonomous decisions, such as whether to proceed to the next reaction step.

The decision-making process occurs almost instantaneously—if the robot analyzes data at 3:00 am, it will decide which reactions to advance by 3:01 am. In contrast, it could take a human chemist several hours to analyze and make the same decision.

"The robots have less contextual breadth than a trained researcher so in its current form, it won't have a "Eureka!" moment. But for the tasks that we gave it here, the AI logic made more or less the same decisions as a synthetic chemist across these three different chemistry problems, and it makes these decisions in the blink of an eye," said Professor Cooper, in a statement.

Liverpool team hopes to employ this technology in the future to find novel materials for uses, including carbon dioxide capture and chemical reactions related to pharmaceutical medication production.

Researchers highlight that even though the study employed two mobile robots , the number of robot teams that may be employed is unlimited. This method might, therefore, be applied to the biggest industrial labs.