Mobile Robotic Chemists for Autonomous Synthetic Chemistry

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Industrial chemistry labs have not changed significantly in the last 25 years. The vast majority of experimentation supporting late phase drug development activities is performed manually one reaction at a time. There have been significant advances in automation, but these have been primarily focused on small scale high-throughput chemistry. As chemistry processes are scaled up, the geometry and agitation characteristics of the reaction vessels become very important. Reactions that have been optimised on small scale may not be reproducible when scaled to more industrially representative vessels. In this project we will develop a new approach: the use of mobile robotic chemists to operate round bottom flasks and/or controlled laboratory reaction vessels to perform autonomous synthetic chemistry. This project will build on the Cooper group's recent progress in the area of mobile robotic chemists: Nature 2020, 583, 237-241 - videos of the autonomous system can be found in the supporting information section.This project will involve the development of the hardware and the software needed to automate synthetic chemistry processes and will deliver training in organic synthesis and robotic technologies for industrially relevant synthetic methodologies. The project will be multidisciplinary and involve the overlap of areas such as experimental chemistry, computational chemistry, robotics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.