Liverpool’s mobile robot chemist runs 688 experiments in 8 days and finds a 6× better photocatalyst
Result confirmed
The takeaway
Andrew Cooper’s group (Nature, July 2020) built a mobile robot that moved around a standard lab and ran 688 experiments over 8 days in a 10-variable space, guided by batched Bayesian optimisation.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- 688 experiments, 8 days, 10-dimensional search space
- ~6× improvement in hydrogen-evolution activity
- Operated autonomously, including nights and weekends
What happened
A humanoid-sized mobile robot used ordinary lab instruments and an optimisation algorithm to choose and run experiments by itself.
Why it matters
It is a landmark for self-driving laboratories, the physical half of the “AI scientist” vision.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 press
Primary
- A mobile robotic chemist (Nature)nature.com, paper
Press
- C&EN: Robot runs almost 700 chemistry experimentscen.acs.org, press
Changes
- Filed