A service robot for automating the sample management in biotechnological cell cultivations

Abstract

In this paper we present a mobile robot system that is capable of automating the sample management in a biotechnological laboratory. The system consists of a mobile platform and a robot arm. It can navigate freely in the laboratory and operate standard devices needed for the sample management. The platform uses an extended Kalman filter for localization and the A * algorithm for path planning on a tangent graph computed from the laboratory's map. Motion execution has been designed to be as predictable as possible to not irritate, disturb or harm human personnel. The robot arm uses color vision to detect devices and compensate for positioning errors. The parameters and tasks needed to operate the devices are specified in simple scripts to allow quick and easy adaptations to other situations.

Towards automatic nanomanipulation at the atomic scale

“…Dur ing long manipulation periods, e. g. moving thou sands of atoms without rescanning, the drift of the instrument, even for UHV LT-SPMs, has to be compensated. For the estimation of the drift we will use Kalman filtering techniques similar to the localization approach used in mobile robot systems [14]. Requicha et al [13] already demon strated this approach in conjunction with an ambient temperature AFM.…”

A flexible software architecture for multi-modal service robots

“…In [7] a service robot for a biotechnological pilot laboratory is presented. The mobile platform of this robot is equal to parts of TASER which is presented in this paper.…”

“…The parts are accessed via a Controller Area Network (CAN). The mobile platform is controlled by a C/C++ application developed in [7] and enhanced for TASER. It provides a TCP/IP interface to trigger motion commands.…”

Utilization of a mobile manipulator for automating the complete sample management in a biotech laboratory. A real world application for service Robotics

“…Sampling and maintenance of cell culture processes are labor intensive and especially continuous perfusion operations require constant monitoring on a 24/7 basis. This was the driving force to develop a robot at the University of Bielefeld that is capable of carrying out this repetitive task [1,2,3]. However production setups in this kind of labs are very large and a robot would have to move long distances between distinct bioreactors and analysis devices.…”

“…For precise interaction with the lab devices, the robot is also equipped with a camera to detect and localise objects like vials and analysis devices and a force-torque-sensor to prevent any damage by physical contact. All the sensors and effectors are controlled by an on-board computer which can receive user commands or give image, or other sensor feedback to an observing station or to invoke analysis processes at certain stations via wireless network [4,5]. Precise device interaction is carried out as follows: to move to workstations, the robot positions itself using the laser range finders' feedback which is matched to the known map of the lab and some characteristic landmarks.…”