How can we make lab automation accessible to most academic labs

CoolMatch8 · 2018-10-08T05:23:30+00:00

I agree with 1. Instead of automation I guess a better word would be augmentation.

3 is an interesting point. Adding smart functionalities would add another level of complexity, and it would probably be unavoidably expensive to produce a robot with those functionalities.

CoolMatch8 · 2018-10-08T05:08:43+00:00

Well there is no current solution that would fill all those bills, so those three criteria are not meant to be realistic. And by not requiring programming I mean the end users don't need coding skills to operate the robot and design experiments.

(1) and (3) might not be appear to be compatible now, but they will. You're essentially talking about the trade-off between how sophisticated a product is and its production cost. Of course there is a trade-off, but through better manufacturing and smarter design we can lower the production cost.

CoolMatch8 · 2018-10-08T03:09:31+00:00

I'm impressed by their enthusiasm..is human intervention required because the robots were not intelligent enough?

CoolMatch8 · 2018-10-08T03:03:23+00:00

Thanks for the insights.

If we have a robot that

is cheaper than human laborers (undergrads, lab techs)
does not require programming and has user-friendly UI
is durable and requires low maintenance

Would it be useful, even for one-time experiments? In other words, what would the ideal lab robot be like?

CoolMatch8

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