Robotic crowd biology accelerates life science researches

A new research concept “robotic crowd biology” that was proposed by a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Nozomu Yachie at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo and Robotic Biology Consortium to accelerate various life science researches was published in Nature Biotechnology.

In natural science, experimental data is not always reproducible. Fast-growing technologies have enabled large-scale and high-throughput experimentations but have also increased the demand for labor-intensive work requiring repetitive tasks to continue being performed by valuable human resources. High biosafety level experiments incur costs for preventive measures of researchers being exposed to harmful reagents such as pathogens and radioisotopes. Resources in a laboratory are seldom fully utilized, and large resource surpluses are produced daily from expensive instruments and laboratory spaces.

To minimize these problems, the authors presented a humanoid robot “Maholo” developed with the leadership of the Molecular Research Profiling Center, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and discussed about the robotic crowd biology concept proposed by Associate Professor Yachie, in which a crowd of humanoid robots and an assortment of instruments in a large laboratory space are operated remotely online.