Laboratory Automation
Research and development activities in laboratory automation, including robotic experimentation, collaborative robots, and AI-assisted materials discovery.
Accelerating Condition Exploration for Ceramic Chemical Sintering Using Robotic Automation
AIST Chubu Center, 2024
Participated in a collaborative project with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to establish an automated experimental workflow for ceramic chemical sintering processes.
The project focused on automating powder-handling operations for high-throughput materials exploration, where large numbers of compositional experiments are required to identify promising ceramic materials. A collaborative robot system was developed to perform repetitive powder preparation tasks, reducing manual workload and significantly increasing experimental throughput.
A key contribution was the development of robotic manipulation techniques capable of handling powder materials inside controlled environments such as gloveboxes. By integrating collaborative robots with custom mechanical mechanisms, human-like operations such as powder leveling and container handling were successfully reproduced.
The automated experimental platform enabled rapid generation of experimental datasets, supporting AI-based prediction of material compositions and accelerating the discovery of novel ceramic compounds.
Related media coverage
- “AIST Chubu Center Establishes Robotic Method for Accelerating Condition Exploration in Ceramic Chemical Sintering Processes” Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, July 8, 2024
