Safe Tele-Operated Robotic Chemistry (S-TORCH)

Handling hazardous materials, such as those in air-sensitive chemistry, presents significant risks to chemists in the lab and requires specialist expertise. This project addresses this challenge by developing a framework that allows expert chemists to perform complex tasks remotely and safely alongside a robotic partner. The project is delivering a proof-of-concept demonstrator featuring a robot manipulator located in the Institute for Safe Autonomy (ISA), teleoperated by a chemist based in the Department of Chemistry, on a different part of the campus.

The project combines expertise from across all three of ISA’s research pillars:

Communications: Providing high reliability, low latency networks to ensure real-time transmission of  commands and sensory feedback between the two sites.
Design and verification: Creating a library of “robotic primitives”, the precise actions required to carry out the experiment.
Assurance: Developing a robust safety assurance case to govern the human-robot collaboration via teleoperation.

The project is developing a digital twin of the robotic cell within a VR environment, integrating haptic-enabled controllers to provide one-to-one mapping between the operator's hand movements and the robot’s actions. The team is working towards an end to end physical demonstration of a chemistry procedure conducted via remote control.

Project lead: Jihong Zhu

The S-TORCH project has led the team to secure a major new grant.

Find out more about the next stage of this project