Mobile Robotic Chemists for Autonomous Synthetic Chemistry

在过去的25年里，工业化学实验室没有明显的变化。支持晚期药物开发活动的绝大多数实验都是手工进行的，一次一个反应。在自动化方面取得了重大进展，但这些进展主要集中在小规模高通量化学上。随着化学过程的放大，反应容器的几何和搅拌特性变得非常重要。在小规模上优化的反应在扩大到更具工业代表性的容器时可能无法重现。在这个项目中，我们将开发一种新的方法：使用移动机器人化学家来操作圆底烧瓶和/或受控的实验室反应容器，以执行自主合成化学。这个项目将建立在库珀小组在移动机器人化学家领域的最新进展：自然2020,583,237-241-自主系统的视频可以在支持信息部分找到。这个项目将涉及自动化合成化学过程所需的硬件和软件的开发，并将提供有机合成和与工业相关的合成方法的机器人技术方面的培训。该项目将是多学科的，涉及实验化学、计算化学、机器人学、算法和人工智能等领域的重叠。

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.