A technology has been developed that uses robots rather than humans to evaluate the performance of newly developed catalysts. By operating 45 times faster than manual work while also improving precision, it is expected to significantly shorten catalyst development timelines. A research team led by Dr. Ji Chan Park of the Clean Fuel Research Laboratory at the Korea Institute of Energy Research has developed a system that fully automates complex and repetitive catalyst performance evaluation experiments.

Developing new catalysts requires large-scale, repetitive experiments with frequent changes to catalyst composition and reaction conditions. Manual experiments are time-consuming and error prone. A team has automated this process and significantly increased reproducibility by employing robots to manage reagent compositions and run the repeated tests.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    Weird article. Is this some domain specific breakthrough? Because I’m fairly sure laboratories and researchers use some ultra precise experimental setups and sampling machines for like half a century now? For example an elaborate machine that loads 200 blood samples at a time and it’ll return the lab results to the hospital within a few hours. For what used to be a time consuming, labor intensive job with a higher error rate before… But we have these machines for quite some time now… They didn’t include any AI in the advertising, though. Same with material sciences, I believe. Either they’re doing something very specific and it’s a lot of manual labor. Or they have to test a lot of samples, or handle things very precisely, and someone is going to build a jig with robots or actuators. But that’s kind of what people always did? I mean they did palletizing robots in the 60s, and the KUKA robot arm was patented in 1973. And this article reads a bit (to me) like the job description of such a KUKA robotic arm… But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?