Chemist Eye: A Visual Language Model-Powered System for Safety Monitoring and Robot Decision-Making in Self-Driving Laboratories

The integration of robotics and automation into self-driving laboratories (SDLs) can introduce additional safety complexities, in addition to those that already apply to conventional research laboratories. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is an essential requirement for ensuring the safety and well-being of workers in laboratories, self-driving or otherwise. Fires are another important risk factor in chemical laboratories. In SDLs, fires that occur close to mobile robots, which use flammable lithium batteries, could have increased severity. Here, we present Chemist Eye, a distributed safety monitoring system designed to enhance situational awareness in SDLs. The system integrates multiple stations equipped with RGB, depth, and infrared cameras, designed to monitor incidents in SDLs. Chemist Eye is also designed to spot workers who have suffered a potential accident or medical emergency, PPE compliance and fire hazards. To do this, Chemist Eye uses decision-making driven by a vision-language model (VLM). Chemist Eye is designed for seamless integration, enabling real-time communication with robots. Based on the VLM recommendations, the system attempts to drive mobile robots away from potential fire locations, exits, or individuals not wearing PPE, and issues audible warnings where necessary. It also integrates with third-party messaging platforms to provide instant notifications to lab personnel. We tested Chemist Eye with real-world data from an SDL equipped with three mobile robots and found that the spotting of possible safety hazards and decision-making performances reached 97 % and 95 %, respectively.

An Open-source Capping Machine Suitable for Confined Spaces

In the context of self-driving laboratories (SDLs), ensuring automated and error-free capping is crucial, as it is a ubiquitous step in sample preparation. Automated capping in SDLs can occur in both large and small workspaces (e.g., inside a fume hood). However, most commercial capping machines are designed primarily for large spaces and are often too bulky for confined environments. Moreover, many commercial products are closed-source, which can make their integration into fully autonomous workflows difficult. This paper introduces an open-source capping machine suitable for compact spaces, which also integrates a vision system that recognises capping failure. The capping and uncapping processes are repeated 100 times each to validate the machine's design and performance. As a result, the capping machine reached a 100 % success rate for capping and uncapping. Furthermore, the machine sealing capacities are evaluated by capping 12 vials filled with solvents of different vapour pressures: water, ethanol and acetone. The vials are then weighed every 3 hours for three days. The machine's performance is benchmarked against an industrial capping machine (a Chemspeed station) and manual capping. The vials capped with the prototype lost 0.54 % of their content weight on average per day, while the ones capped with the Chemspeed and manually lost 0.0078 % and 0.013 %, respectively. The results show that the capping machine is a reasonable alternative to industrial and manual capping, especially when space and budget are limitations in SDLs.