A Tokyo laboratory opened in April uses ten robots to perform basic life-science tasks. The robots use two arms to handle liquids, grow cells on plates, and operate scientific instruments. The facility is planned to be available to other researchers later in the year. The long-term goal is a factory-scale setup with thousands of robots for use by scientists locally and internationally by 2040 or 2050. Two-armed robots enable more complex and sophisticated work than one-armed systems. The robots include artificial-intelligence software that makes some decisions, analyzes results, and improves experimental methods. AI has been used to test many conditions for culturing human stem cells and to image cells, predict growth, and determine optimal timing.
"A laboratory with that many robots would be exciting, says Yan Zeng, a materials scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "I will be curious to see how soon they are really going to achieve that goal," notes Zeng, who hopes that the lab could be used by scientists globally, like other leading scientific facilities such as Europe's particle-physics lab CERN."
"The robots in the Tokyo lab also contain artificial-intelligence software that enables them to make some decisions themselves. The robots aren't just automating the work, they can analyse and improve on experimental methods, says Andrew Cooper, a chemist at the University of Liverpool, UK."
"The robots can make decisions about the experiments, says Kanda. For example, an AI program used by Kanda and his team identified and tested 144 experimental conditions in 111 days to work out the optimal conditions for culturing human stem cells."
"In another experiment, an AI program was able to image cells being cultured on a dish, predict how the cells would grow over time and then work out the best tim"
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