This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every new generation of phone display, television screen and solar panel is the result of precision optics experiments, which use lasers and other light sources to measure the optical properties of candidate materials. These experiments can take months to run, requiring scientists to meticulously angle and adjust delicate light sources, mirrors, cameras and other components in a process of careful, constant tuning that can be physically tedious and time-consuming.
But MIT scientists say the whole process of building and running an optics experiment could one day be fully automated. Taking a step toward such a future, they have developed a reconfigurable robotic optics laboratory. The new robotic lab autonomously assembles standard optical components into desired configurations.
It can then tune the angle and position of mirrors and lenses with micron-scale precision to produce beams of light with specific properties. The system can also safely dismantle an experiment and reassemble the parts into an entirely new setup. The team showed that the robotic system could autonomously build and fine-tune a tabletop laser cavity—a key element of most optics experiments.
The system could also precisely manipulate components to perform several optical tasks, such as centering a laser beam, aligning multiple beams and automatically stabilizing the beams in response to physical disturbances. "We start with randomly placed components," says Sachin Vaidya, a postdoc in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. "At the end, we have a fully functioning laser that the robot has built." The researchers are expanding the robotic lab in a physical and virtual sense.
In addition to improving the system's physical sensing, maneuvering and overall space, they are developing a cloud-based application that gives users virtual access to the physical robot. They envision that one day, scientists from anywhere will be able to remotely access robotic optics labs and virtually submit experimental protocols or queries that the labs would then set up and run autonomously. "There are many things this could enable," says Marin Soljacic, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT.
"A robot isn't going to get bored. It can work 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, on very boring things. That will free up so much creativity and time for scientists to then push theories and see what we can do.
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