(MIT Technology Review) – Researchers have created a robotic system that can follow verbal cues and perform experiments.

Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report?

Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers at the University of Toronto that can perform chemistry experiments. In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, the team reported that the system could automate some chemistry lab tasks using a combination of computer vision and a large language model (LLM) that translates scientists’ verbal cues into an experimental pipeline. (Read More)