[Colloquium] Rory Butler MS Presentation/Mar 5 2024

[Megan Woodward]

This is an announcement of Rory Butler's MS Presentation
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Candidate: Rory Butler

Date: Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Time:  1 pm CST

Location: JCL 298

Title: Designing Simulator Technologies to Support the Development of Autonomous Laboratories

Abstract: Autonomous laboratories enable the acceleration of scientific discovery by automating the process of experiment design, in-laboratory experimentation, data collection, and analysis of results through a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence. However, to build successful autonomous laboratories, we need the ability to verify these automatically generated experiment designs for execution viability and safety, and optimize the design of experiments for maximal efficiency at scale. We introduce an approach to designing simulation technologies for autonomous laboratories that will enable the automation of this verification and optimization of experiments. We discuss the limits of current technologies on simulating robot physics, laboratory consumables such as physical or fluid materials, and simulating the underlying chemistry or biology. We explore simulation capability to help detect various experimental design errors ranging from potential robot collisions to overall experiment design flaws, and we explore how a simulated laboratory can help evaluate the design of both the experiment and the laboratory itself for various functions such as speed, bandwidth, floor space, and cost. Finally, we explore how we can expose these simulation results to external AI systems to inform future designs. Using NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim we demonstrate our current progress towards building simulations that explore these necessary capabilities for successful autonomous laboratories.

Advisors: Rick Stevens

Committee Members: Ian Foster, Arvind Ramanathan, and Rick Stevens


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