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Chemical R&D is the backbone of countless important technologies including life-saving medicines, energy harvesting and storage materials, and additive manufacturing. Chemists, who hold nearly 100,000 US jobs, face considerable risks in the workplace, leading to tens of thousands of injuries per year. Synthetic chemists must take great care to avoid chemical exposures, fires and explosions, while they are also challenged by high physical and cognitive demands owing to the laborious, manual nature of synthetic chemistry procedures. It is highly anticipated that robotics could improve working conditions for chemists by reducing these risks and challenges, while accelerating the pace of chemical R&D. Robotics have already revolutionized the workplace in many industries (e.g. manufacturing, packaging, and shipping), but most chemical R&D labs remain devoid of robots, likely due to the high number, diversity, and complexity of tasks involved in this work. Furthermore, most of the chemical synthesis robots currently in development are designed to replace or displace the human chemist.

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The objective of this proposal is to evaluate the benefits and challenges of an alternative approach, where collaborative robots deployed in the lab work together with chemists and provide them with helpful task assistance, rather than end-to-end automation of all activities.ÌýTo realize the vision of collaborative mobile robots that provide autonomous task assistance to chemical R&D workers in order to reduce mental/physical workload while improving safety and efficiency, three threads of research are integrated: (1) classify, model, and evaluate robotic efficacy in various chemistry procedures, (2) develop novel task planning and interaction programming for mobile robots to interact with synthetic chemists, and (3) create both hardware and software to ensure safe and autonomous deployment of mobile collaborative robots in unstructured laboratory environments. Weaving these three threads of research together, the project will identify and demonstrate scenarios in which human-robot teams may collaborate effectively on various specific subtasks of organic synthesis procedures.

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