The increasing automation of laboratory equipment certainly improves research
productivity, but advances in robotics are not (yet) centrally connected to the underlying ways in
which researchers themselves might develop approaches to undertake innovation itself across
multiple domains. There are of course counterexamples to this proposition: robotic space
probes have been a very important research tool in planetary science, and the ability of
automated remote sensing devices to collect data at very large scale or in challenging
environments may transform some fields of research. But robots continue to be used principally
in specialized end-use “production” applications.
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