The development of the internet of things has led to an explosion in the number of networked devices capable of control and computing. However, whilst common place in remote sensing, these approaches have not impacted chemistry due to difficulty in developing hardware and software systems flexible and varied enough for experimental data collection. We present a simple and affordable (&lt;$500) chemistry capable robot built with a standard set of hardware and software protocols that can be networked to coordinate many chemical experiments in real time, such that the different chemical reactions can be distributed over many sites simultaneously, see Figure. We demonstrate how multiple chemical processes can be done with two internet connected robots collaboratively, exploring a set of azo-coupling reactions in a fraction of time needed for a single robot, as well as encoding and decoding information into a network of oscillating BZ reactions transferring a message between two different locations using chemical reactions. The system can also be used to assess the reproducibility of chemical reactions and discover new reaction outcomes using game playing to explore a list of reaction conditions not accessible when the robots instead take it in turn to each a pre-define reaction from a list.

Networking chemically capable robots using Twitter for RealTimeChem

256th National Meeting (2018)

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