An assistant professor in the Paul M Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder is leading a team that’s designing robotic sidekicks that can assist chemists with burdensome or unsafe tasks.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, chemists and materials scientists held nearly 100,000 jobs in the USA in 2023 and overall employment is expected to grow by eight per cent over the next ten years. But according to Carson Bruns, unlike other large and growing industries, chemical research and development has remained devoid of robots, often leading to injuries and considerable risks in the workplace.
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‘There are a lot of potential benefits for introducing robots into a chemical lab that haven’t been explored yet,’ said Bruns, who is also affiliated with the ATLAS Institute, Biomedical Engineering Program and Materials Science and Engineering Program. ‘Our angle involves trying to reduce work burdens and safety risks, develop robots that collaborate with humans instead of replacing them, and increase accessibility so that even people with disabilities can perform chemistry.’
The project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is in collaboration with researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and CU Boulder’s Department of Computer Science. It started with an extensive observation-based task analysis that allowed Bruns and his team in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab to develop a strong understanding of the various tasks that chemists were performing regularly in a wet lab.
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After observing, interviewing and surveying their chemist test subjects, Bruns and his group were able to identify an array of different tasks that can potentially benefit from human and robot collaboration.
‘We learned right away that chemists don’t really like doing a purification task called dialysis that is very common in a wet lab,’ Bruns said. ‘It’s repetitive, it takes a lot of time and sometimes chemists have to come back to the lab in the middle of the night to change dialysis bags, which they don’t want to do. It seemed like a great case for a robot, so we built a robotic system automating the dialysis process.’
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Bruns says his team of researchers has a list of other potential benefit areas, as well, including simple tasks such as stabilising a flask or offering a third hand to hold something for chemists when they need it. They are even trying to find solutions for more complex safety issues so that chemists can stay far away from violent and dangerous reactions.
But that’s not where the project ends. There is also an outreach portion aimed at improving science education and enhancing youth interest in science. Led by PhD student Diane Jung, Bruns and his team ran a four-day interactive workshop series at a local middle school (for children from about nine to 13 years old) in Boulder. These workshops invited the students to build robots with Lego and use them to perform various chemistry experiments – something that’s already happening in Bruns’ lab.
‘We’ve been building ordinary automation tools out of Lego because it’s cheaper and reconfigurable. When you don’t need it anymore, you just disassemble it and build it into something else,’ said Bruns. ‘So we thought we could use this Lego thing we had going on in our lab already to appeal to a younger audience and show kids the fun and evolving intersection between chemistry and robotics in real time.’
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During the workshop series, Bruns noticed various groups of students approaching experiments with unique perspectives and ideas. He said it was inspiring to see young kids actively engage with the science in front of them. But most importantly, he saw the kids have fun.
‘Thinking back to young Carson when he was a kid – it always just seemed very fun to me,’ Bruns said. ‘I had positive role models in my life who also believed science was fun, so that was our goal with this part of the project. To help kids have a more positive association with the idea of science and engineering.’