Flexible Robot Platform for Sample Preparation Automation with a User-friendly Interface

Robots play a vital role in life science automations. This paper is to present an industrial dual-arm robot platform used to transfer sample preparation processes from the manual to automated ones, with a user-friendly interface for designing the processes. Due to its two multi-axis arms, the robot is flexible to handle various tools, such as pipettes, syringes, vials, microplates, thermoshakers or ultrasonic machines, which are identical to manually used tools. This endows the platform with the potential of "copying" (without major changing, most parts keeping the same) multi manual processes to automated ones. However, the complexity of programming for industrial robots is one of the major barriers preventing automation and limiting flexibility, especially for an industrial dual-arm robot. In this paper, a flexible and easy-to-use software system has been developed for the robot platform, which consists of three parts: (1) a user interface software, (2) robot programs and (3) an interface program. Finally, an automated process of sample preparation for determining cholesterol by the dual-arm robot has been described. And prepared samples by the robot had been analyzed by a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) instrument, with the coefficient of variance being below 10%.