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Mahoro Two-Armed Lab Robot
Mahoro is a two-armed lab robot developed by Yaskawa and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Each arm has seven joints, allowing it sufficient degrees of freedom to use tools designed for humans.
(Mahoro Two-Armed Lab Robot video)
Developed by automation giant Yaskawa and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), co-creator of the HRP series of humanoid robots, Mahoro is a two-armed droid that looks like a modified Yaskawa Motoman assembly robot.Unlike most assembly robots, its arms have seven joints, allowing it to use human tools and to perform humanlike motions easily.
It automates lab work and can do tasks such as culturing more quickly and accurately than human lab techs, DigInfo News tells us in the vid below. It can work on things like flu testing as well as handle biohazards, keeping human technicians out of harm's way, according to AIST's Tohru Natsume.
When I saw the video, I thought immediately of the teleoperated lab robot from James Blish's 1957 novel Cities in Flight:
he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope...
SF writer Greg Bear has thought about the other niceties of an automated lab; in this case, the automated specimen track:
The sorter and analyzers were connected by steel and white plastic automated specimen tracks, running like a little railroad through diffraction molecular imagers, inoculators/incubators, and a variety of video microscopes - including two up-to-the-minute carbon force counters. All magnificently automated. A one- or at most two-person lab.
Update 23-Aug-2026: I forgot about the electronic brain lab robot from Alchemy of Outer Space by D.L. James, published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938:
It had found a rather large crucible somewhere.NOW it came clumping across the laboratory floor with this platinum pot, placing it on the workbench, underneath and in the full illumination of an overhanging electric bulb. Martery's excitement reached fever heat.
"Heavens!" he gasped, between teeth that were still clenched on the stem of his long-dead pipe. "It's going to mix up something!"
(Electronic Brain lab robot from 'Alchemy of Outer Space' by D.L. James)The Brain dumped some of this powder into the crucible.
But before Martery had finished scribbling - he was trying to estimate the amount - the thing was back with another bottle.
Thus that hellish formula was compounded-the Brain clumping to and fro between workbench and chemical shelf, I trying to keep track of the ingredients used, Martery scribbling in his notebook. So quickly did the Brain work that soon we were left in confusion. Never once did it pause or hesitate over a container. It seemed to know instinctively the contents of each jar and phial, for it never examined a label, never measured the amount dumped into the crucible.
End update.
Via Cnet.
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