• Question: Can you invent a robot that would help you with your work

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      • Royal Society of Chemistry: Find out more about:
      Asked by Camps to Elizabeth, James, Martin, Rob on 19 Mar 2015.
      • Photo: James Coombs OBrien

        James Coombs OBrien answered on 19 Mar 2015:


        I’m a researcher which means I try to discover new things. It’s hard to get robots to do research because they would have to think for themselves.

        We actually do use a lot of robots already in chemistry but just to do the boring stuff like running boring reactions or putting samples into machines. We save the fun stuff for us humans, robots can’t have all the fun!

        In the future I’m sure we will have even more robots helping us, not just in science but in everything. But for research, you still need a human brain to come up with the ideas!

        Thanks for your question!

      • Photo: Elizabeth Cooper

        Elizabeth Cooper answered on 20 Mar 2015:


        I would love to invent a robot to help with my work (and to clean up the house, and do the cooking!) however I don’t think I could make one as I do not not much about electronics!

        Robots could only help doing manual work they could not help coming up with ideas!

      • Photo: Martin Ward

        Martin Ward answered on 20 Mar 2015:


        If I could invent a robot that could take pictures and video of my experiment when I wasn’t there and then use those pictures to figure out how big the crystals I was making were and how quickly they grew etc. would be very useful for me! I am actually trying to figure out some software to do this for me, minus the robot part though 🙂

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