The Robotics Innovation Center at the Institute of Science Tokyo opened its automated laboratory in April. Later this year, the lab will be made available for use by other researchers at the institute, says Genki Kanda, an automation researcher who works at the robotics centre. He says that the lab's ultimate goal is to create a 'factory-scale' facility with thousands of robots that could be used by local and international scientists by 2040 or 2050. A laboratory with that many robots would be exciting, says Yan Zeng, a materials scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 'I will be curious to see how soon they are really going to achieve that goal,' notes Zeng, who hopes that the lab could be used by scientists globally, like other leading scientific facilities such as Europe's particle-physics lab CERN. Researchers in the life sciences have been automating lab work for at least a decade. Some facilities have one-armed robots that can handle samples in experiments,...
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