Automation has secured a place in the modern drug, material and life sciences laboratory. Time consuming experiments with repetitive and tedious operations make automated setups an attractive way of pushing new discoveries and exploring new protocols.
Automated setups have the ability to precisely and persistently repeat tasks, making them the go to solution for scaling up the throughput and increasing the reproducibility of experiments, a topic that many researchers consider in crisis nowadays. Most automated solutions are built to repeat a single specific set of steps in an experimental task, and although more and more setups have started including components that enable task flexibility, as new different experiments need to be performed, considering work and engineering expertise is needed to design and implement new setups.
This makes automation an odyssey to researchers that endeavor into the field and crash into the challenges of building and using automated setups. These challenges include the standardization of software and hardware interfaces for communication, material transfer and programming, the modularization and encapsulation of different operations, the use of machine vision to detect tools familiar to the researcher, improving the safety of the different processes and hardware around the setup, and the use of digital twins to test and train researchers in the use of the different tools available.
How to streamline the process of building and using automation for researchers and develop tools that enable the use by everyone of lab automation technologies is still an open question. This workshop will start the conversation about these challenges among both robotics researchers and the end users of these technologies, namely researchers in the natural sciences and related areas.
Topics
Main topics
– Safety
– Standardization – Interfaces, Communication, Programming
– Modularity
– Ease of Use
– Machine vision
– Digital Twins
Can also include
– Network construction, beyond ICRA
– Standardisation of Hardware interfaces (e.g. generic robotic flange)
– ROS-in-Automation and ROS-SiLa interface
– ROS-Aruco
– ROS-Visual Servoing
– Pro/con of using anthropomorphic dual-arm design to automize manual tasks
– Scheduling
– Process simulation inkl. Error Handling
– Different and unconventional ways for transporting samples and materials (Flow systems, modified vessels, solid transport, cleaning),
– Modularity of different components and operations
– Ease of use for low engineering skills users
– Reconfiguration and reuse for different experiments
Sponsors
