Hi,

That is a very good question. In my PhD I built, among other things, a very primitive parallel stirring system in order to speed up the synthesis of test batches. Although a very crude device, there was tons of stuff that I needed to optimize.

There are many steps in the practical work that is chemical synthesis. It might be removing air, adding reagents in different elemental states, cooling/heating/keeping and certain temperature, observing the reaction, taking aliquots, terminating reaction, and the many steps of purification.

I'd argue that while automation is possible to a certain degree (continuous reactor systems are the most the most interesting IMHO), the resulting mashines are always problem (reagent, reaction, etc) specific. And here lies the problem.