04.03.09
The Robot Scientist
„The Robot Scientist is perhaps the first physical implementation of the task of Scientific Discovery in a microbiology laboratory. It represents the merging of increasingly automated and remotely controllable laboratory equipment and knowledge discovery techniques from Artificial Intelligence.
Automation of laboratory equipment (the “Robot” of Robot Scientist) has revolutionised laboratory practice by removing the “drudgery” of constructing many wet lab experiments by hand, allowing an increase in both the scope and scale of potential experiments. Most lab robots only require a simple description of the various chemical/ biological entities to be used in the experiments, along with their required volumes and where these entities are stored. Automation has also given rise to significantly increased productivity and a concomitant increase in the production of results and data requiring interpretation, giving rise to an “interpretation bottleneck” where the process of understanding the results is lagging behind the production of results.“ [read original article]