A Two Robot Team Cuts time from 32 Days Manual Work to 17 Hours
What once took a team of researchers over a month to complete can now be done in less than a day. That’s the headline-grabbing result from a new study out of South Korea’s Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER), where scientists have developed a dual-robot platform that compresses 32 days of manual catalyst testing into just 17 hours.
The research, led by Dr. Ji Chan Park of KIER’s Clean Fuel Research Laboratory and published in Chemical Science, tackles a genuinely tedious bottleneck in materials science: catalyst performance evaluation. Developing new catalysts — the substances that speed up and control chemical reactions in everything from fuel cells to industrial manufacturing — requires enormous amounts of repetitive experimentation. Composition changes, reaction condition tweaks, sample loading, measurement recording — it’s painstaking work, and it’s exactly the kind of work that humans don’t do consistently. Results can vary depending on who runs the experiment and when.
The KIER team’s solution is an elegantly coordinated two-robot system. The first robot handles sample identification, precise positioning, and spectral measurements. The second manages the operational logistics — retrieving samples, disposing of used ones, and replacing consumables — allowing experiments to run continuously overnight and across long durations without anyone in the lab. Together, operating on an integrated control system, the two robots achieve a 45-fold speed increase and reduce result variability by about 32%.
That last point matters as much as the speed. Faster experiments mean little if the data is noisy. By removing human handling from the loop, the platform produces more reliable measurements that researchers can actually trust.
This isn’t just a proof-of-concept curiosity. The team has already secured a Korean patent for the system, and the technology has a clear commercial path toward deployment in industrial and research labs worldwide. As the race to develop better catalysts for clean energy applications intensifies, tools that can dramatically accelerate the discovery cycle could have real-world consequences for how quickly we develop cleaner fuels and more sustainable chemical processes.
The robots, it turns out, are pretty good at chemistry.
This topic is featured in Great News podcast episode 32
Source: Phys.org
