Teaching a
robot a new trick is a challenge. You can’t reward it with treats and it
doesn’t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in
the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made
much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.”
Nathan
Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy
Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming
a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming
language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots
and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been
considered.