Wanted: special-purpose robots automating life science wet lab workflows

Keywords: laboratory automation • life science • special-purpose robots • wet lab Compared with manufacturing and service industries, the life science R&D industry in general is lagging behind in terms of utilizing large-scale industrial automation for productivity , capacity and quality improvements. Granted, the exploratory and dynamic nature of life science R&D dictates that for most life science R&D projects that come and go, there is not a fixed procedure to begin with, and there is no way to predict how a project is going to end up either. This uncertainty makes automation of general life science R&D work-flows difficult. Still, life scientists around the world are working hard to isolate, extract and automate the portions of the workflow that can be automated [1]. Over the past decades, much progress has been made in the automation of analytical separation and detection, data acquisitions and downstream data extraction and processing. Relatively speaking, the progress of automating life science wet lab work-flows has been much slower, due largely to the lackluster tools available. The downsides of general-purpose liquid handling robots Since a common denominator of life science R&D wet lab workflow is liquid, current robot manufacturers all aim to maximize the applicability of their products to assorted life science workflows (translation: maximizing profits) and offer general-purpose liquid handling robots (GPLHR). This makes their internal robotic products R&D relatively simple, but while the goal of GPLHRs is to suit all applications, they in fact please no one. For ordinary end-user groups, those robots are just too much of a hassle – difficult to use, crash often and the results vary [2–4]. Since there are no commercially available liquid-handling robots that tailor to their specific workflows, much postacquisition customiza-tion and development needs to be done either by internal staff, vendor staff or both, if they wish to automate more than just a few isolated steps of their experiments. Customization, development and maintenance costs aside, the process is slow, there is often no guarantee of the quality of such custom work and quality and success varies from one organization to another. For those end users' management, it is often a struggle to see through the clouds of the capital expenditure, dedicated automation FTE investment [2], slow customization and slow adoption among ordinary scientists to find out whether the robots are worth the investment [3,4]. For the robot manufacturers , because the barrier of entry for …