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Description
In talking with other researchers at the recent research review we got some feedback on what would make ARES a tool that they would be interested in using. One of the key pieces of feedback was the ability to gradually incorporate it into workflow in labs or processes where automation is not yet on the table. The gist of this need is that there are a lot of researchers who are bench chemists who are doing manual experiments, but who could be interested in using ARES OS as a sort of advanced experimental planner and data organization tool. I think the way to achieve "meet people where they are" approach would be to allow any element of the autonomy loop to be replaced with some human effort or input.
A few example scenarios:
- A system where the experimental execution is automated, but data collection and analysis is manual, with a significant time lag. This often arises when one part of a team is making materials and then sending it off to collaborators for analysis, or when analysis hardware will only talk to proprietary software that doesn't offer any API. In this case we would want the ability to interactively upload some sort of analyzed data (probably a CSV)
-A researcher already has code for automatically analyzing their data, and a BO planner they want to use but cannot build the robot to automatically carry out the experiment due to limited funding, shared lab space, etc. In this case we would need to be able to suspend the campaign to wait for the researcher to carry out the next experiment and then a way to upload the raw data into the analysis pipeline
I'm going to outline the features that I think would be necessary for this and make other issues for these specific items.
- Pause and wait for human approval and/or input
- Suspend campaign execution to resume later
- Interactive data uploads at arbitrary points in the autonomy loop
- Automated experiment execution via manual planning from a CSV of conditions