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.
