Towards Robotic Laboratory Automation Plug & Play: Teaching-free Robot Integration with the LAPP Digital Twin

The Laboratory Automation Plug & Play (LAPP) framework is a high-level abstraction layer that makes the autonomous operation of life science laboratory robots possible. The plug & play nature lies in the fact that the manual teaching and configuration of robots is not required. A digital twin (DT) based concept is proposed that outlines the types of information that has to be provided for each relevant component of the system. In particular, for the devices that the robot interfaces with, the robot positions have to be defined beforehand in a device-attached coordinate system (CS) by the vendor. This CS has to be detectable by the vision system of the robot by means of optical markers placed on the front side of the device. With that, the robot is capable of tending the machine by performing the pick-and-place type transportation of standard sample carriers. This basic use case is the primary scope of the LAPP-DT framework. The hardware scope is limited to simple benchtop and mobile manipulators with parallel grippers at this stage. This paper first provides an overview of relevant literature and state-of-the-art solutions, after which it outlines the framework on the conceptual level, followed by the specification of the relevant DT parameters for the robot, for the devices and for the facility. Finally, appropriate technologies and strategies are identified for the implementation.

Towards Robotic Laboratory Automation Plug & Play: The "LAPP" Framework

Increasing the level of automation in pharmaceutical laboratories and production facilities plays a crucial role in delivering medicine to patients. However, the particular requirements of this field make it challenging to adapt cutting-edge technologies present in other industries. This article provides an overview of relevant approaches and how they can be utilized in the pharmaceutical industry, especially in development laboratories. Recent advancements include the application of flexible mobile manipulators capable of handling complex tasks. However, integrating devices from many different vendors into an end-to-end automation system is complicated due to the diversity of protocols. Therefore, various approaches for standardization have been considered, and a concept has been proposed for taking them a step further. This concept enables a mobile manipulator with a vision system to ``learn'' the pose of each device and - utilizing a barcode - fetch interface information from a universal cloud database. This information includes control and communication protocol definitions and a representation of robot actions needed to operate the device. In order to define the movements in relation to the device, devices have to feature - besides the barcode - a fiducial marker as standard. The concept will be elaborated following appropriate research activities in follow-up papers.