Commercial liquid handling robots are rarely appropriate when tasks change often, which is the case in the early stages of biochemical research. In order to address it, we have developed EvoBot, a liquid handling robot, which is open-source and employs a modular design. The combination of an open-source and a modular design is particularly powerful because functionality is divided into modules with simple, well-defined interfaces, hence customisation of modules is possible without detailed knowledge of the entire system. Furthermore, the modular design allows end-users to only produce and assemble the modules that are relevant for their specific application. Hence, time and money are not wasted on functionality that is not needed. Finally, modules can easily be reused. In this paper, we describe the EvoBot modular design and through scientific experiments such as basic liquid handling, nurturing of microbial fuel cells, and droplet chemotaxis experiments document how functionality is increased one module at a time with a significant amount of reuse. In addition to providing wet-labs with an extendible, open-source liquid handling robot, we also think that modularity is a key concept that is likely to be useful in other robots developed for scientific purposes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.