I don't really see why most existing equipment would be usable in this way. When you automate a thing you often have to rethink the entire problem. But more generally, automation is for _repeatable_ things and a lot of research is... not that.

The expensive equipment is usually a small (but crucial!) part of research activity, which involves things like talking to a lot of people, getting permission to do weird or new things, going out into the environment and collecting things in very specific ways, storing and transporting them carefully, observing, etc. Building or modifying existing lab instruments, doing various things with animals that are not co-operative ... and CLEANING. Who does all the cleaning?

Definitely use cases when you have a specific protocol you want to scale, but I'm also not sure how safe I would feel around AI with a license to experiment and access to dangerous reagents, high temperatures, etc. Or, god help us, an oligonucleotide synthesizer. Which is definitely going to happen (if it has not already).

>Who does all the cleaning?

In some cases that would be the same person that does the most advanced innovative and/or creative work.

The idea behind the fully automated system is that fewer hired hands are needed for efforts that are routine enough. But not zero, you still need one person who can do everything at a minimum, if called upon for mission-critical operation.

In the case of the creative work and planning where it is out of the league for AI, these things need to always be done too, but they are not exactly "routine".

Once most of the tedious routine tasks are well-automated though, then the human brain behind the lab can finally relax a bit, with eurekas flowing at the same rate without needing a full 40 or 50 addititonal hours at the bench any more, while even more results are generated than they could do single-handedly too.

Which gives them the time to do the cleaning also, otherwise they would need two humans to serve their only automated system.

Probably like a ATLAS or a unitree robot.They are beginning to get very good.