RobInHood: a robotic chemist in a fume hood

Fume hoods protect chemists and the environment from hazardous vapours and airborne substances produced during experiments. They are standard in chemistry laboratories worldwide. However, fume hoods were designed for manual chemistry, and there are still relatively few robotic systems designed to operate within these inherently confined spaces. It is challenging to design robotic systems that can perform the same variety of operations within fume hoods that can be performed by a dexterous human chemist. Here, we present an automated platform comprising a robotic arm that can perform liquid handling, solid handling, capping/decapping, heating and stirring, filtration, and sample imaging within a standard laboratory fume hood (50 cm × 120 cm × 170 cm). The broad applicability of this system was demonstrated in two materials research problems (a dye-based porosity screening workflow and the synthesis of a porous organic cage) and in a phthalimide synthesis. The success of the synthesis workflows was validated offline by NMR, X-ray diffraction, mass spectrometry and FTIR.