Automated chemical synthesis carries great promises of safety, efficiency and reproducibility for both research and industry laboratories. Current approaches are based on specifically-designed automation systems, which present two major drawbacks: (i) existing apparatus must be modified to be integrated into the automation systems; (ii) such systems are not flexible and would require substantial re-design to handle new reactions or procedures. In this paper, we propose a system based on a robot arm which, by mimicking the motions of human chemists, is able to perform complex chemical reactions without any modifications to the existing setup used by humans. The system is capable of precise liquid handling, mixing, filtering, and is flexible: new skills and procedures could be added with minimum effort. We show that the robot is able to perform a Michael reaction, reaching a yield of 34 , which is comparable to that obtained by a junior chemist (undergraduate student in Chemistry).
@cite_8 proposed an automated chemical synthesis laboratory which is capable of modular expansion and allows chemists to remotely guide chemical syntheses for drug discovery. Similar to @cite_11 , the robot arms were mostly used for pick-and-place operations, but also include diluting of samples which was briefly stated.
@cite_11 @cite_8
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This article describes our experiences in creating a fully integrated, globally accessible, automated chemical synthesis laboratory. The goal of the project was to establish a fully integrated automated synthesis solution that was initially focused on minimizing the burden of repetitive, routine, rules-based operations that characterize more established chemistry workflows. The architecture was crafted to allow for the expansion of synthetic capabilities while also providing for a flexible interface that permits the synthesis objective to be introduced and manipulated as needed under the judicious direction of a remote user in real-time. This innovative central synthesis suite is herein described along with some case studies to illustrate the impact such a system is having in expanding drug discovery capabilities. The synthesis of complex organic compounds is largely a manual process that is often incompletely documented. To address these shortcomings, we developed an abstraction that maps commonly reported methodological instructions into discrete steps amenable to automation. These unit operations were implemented in a modular robotic platform using a chemical programming language which formalizes and controls the assembly of the molecules. We validated the concept by directing the automated system to synthesize three pharmaceutical compounds, Nytol, rufinamide, and sildenafil, without any human intervention. Yields and purities of products and intermediates were comparable to or better than those achieved manually. The syntheses are captured as digital code that can be published, versioned, and transferred flexibly between platforms with no modification, thereby greatly enhancing reproducibility and reliable access to complex molecules. Chemical synthesis generally requires labor-intensive, sometimes tedious trial-and-error optimization of reaction conditions. Here, we describe a plug-and-play, continuous-flow chemical synthesis system that mitigates this challenge with an integrated combination of hardware, software, and analytics. The system software controls the user-selected reagents and unit operations (reactors and separators), processes reaction analytics (high-performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, vibrational spectroscopy), and conducts automated optimizations. The capabilities of this system are demonstrated in high-yielding implementations of C-C and C-N cross-coupling, olefination, reductive amination, nucleophilic aromatic substitution (S N Ar), photoredox catalysis, and a multistep sequence. The graphical user interface enables users to initiate optimizations, monitor progress remotely, and analyze results. Subsequent users of an optimized procedure need only download an electronic file, comparable to a smartphone application, to implement the protocol on their own apparatus. The new era with prosperous artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology is reshaping the materials discovery process in a more radical fashion. Here we present authentic intelligent robotics for chemistry (AIR-Chem), integrated with technological innovations in the AI and robotics fields, functionalized with modules including gradient descent-based optimization frameworks, multiple external field modulations, a real-time computer vision (CV) system, and automated guided vehicle (AGV) parts. AIR-Chem is portable and remotely controllable by cloud computing. AIR-Chem can learn the parametric procedures for given targets and carry on laboratory operations in standalone mode, with high reproducibility, precision, and availability for knowledge regeneration. Moreover, an improved nucleation theory of size focusing on inorganic perovskite quantum dots (IPQDs) is theoretically proposed and experimentally testified to by AIR-Chem. This work aims to boost the process of an unmanned chemistry laboratory fr...