自动化和智能化的化学合成

Automated and intelligent chemical synthesis

自动化技术已在现代制造业中广泛应用,但化学合成研发工作的自动化程度较低,仍大量依赖于化学工作者的手工操作.这主要是因为经典的自动化技术的智能化程度不高,难以应用于具有流程多样性和结果不确定性的化学研发.然而,以物联网、协作机器人、人工智能为代表的新一代自动化技术已经能够实现更灵活的部署和更智能的运作,具备了与化学合成与材料研发深度融合的条件.以“无人实验室”为目标的自动化和智能化的化学合成系统正在蓬勃发展.本文对该领域近年来的发展进行了梳理,并对未来的发展进行了展望.

Automation technology has been widely used in modern manufacturing,but chemical synthesis R&D is less automated and still relies heavily on chemists.This is mainly because the classical automation technology without machine intelligence cannot adapt to the process diversity and lacks decision-making ability in facing of uncertainty of results,which are common to chemical R&D.However,the new generation of automation technologies represented by the Internet of Things,collaborative robots,and artificial intelligence has been able to achieve more flexible deployment and smarter operations,and can thus meet the requirement for in depth integration into the chemical synthesis and material research.Automated and intelligent chemical synthesis systems targeting“unmanned laboratories”are booming.The paper is to sort out the advances of this field in recent years,and give an outlook on its future development.