Parametric configuration and programming of flexible robotic cells producing biotechnology experiments

Abstract

AbstractIn the last decades there has been an ever-increasing trend of accelerated scientific research in the biotechnology sector and the COVID-19 pandemic has further emphasized the need for high-throughput yet flexible processes. Even though automation has gained significant popularity to deal with this problem, the focus has been placed at laboratory level and for specific type of processes only. The aim of these automation applications is to offset the increasing costs of clinical trials, automate tedious laboratory work, run experiments in parallel and make scientific testing efficient and programmable. This paper investigates the application of robotic systems at a larger scale that will allow the automated execution of even custom defined biotechnology experiments so that these can be offered as a service to any interested stakeholder. A digital model of the proposed robotic biotechnology workcell is developed and the necessary methodology is investigated to showcase the feasibility of this approach. The goal is to use the digital model for evaluating different design considerations, such as equipment layout and robot types, as well as for planning and simulating the robot operation under various offline programming strategies. To achieve this goal, the Damped Least Squares Method is used for inverse kinematics control and a robotic arm trajectory planner is developed parametrically using characteristic intermediate points so as to create a motion plan that can be used for any robotic manipulator and any experiment within a family of facility setups. Two experiments are simulated using a SCARA robot and an articulated arm robot, each with an alternative cell layout to show the flexibility and robustness of the proposed approach. The obtained results show that the trajectory planner can consistently generate appropriate motion plans.