Integrating a Manual Pipette into a Collaborative Robot Manipulator for Flexible Liquid Dispensing

Abstract

This paper presents a system integration approach for a 6-DoF (Degree of Freedom) collaborative robot to operate a pipette for liquid dispensing. Its technical development is threefold. First, we designed an end-effector for holding and triggering manual pipettes. Second, we took advantage of a collaborative robot to recognize labware poses and planned robotic motion based on the recognized poses. Third, we developed vision-based classifiers to predict and correct positioning errors and thus precisely attached pipettes to disposable tips. Through experiments and analysis, we confirmed that the developed system, especially the planning and visual recognition methods, could help secure high-precision and flexible liquid dispensing. The developed system is suitable for low-frequency, high-repetition biochemical liquid dispensing tasks. We expect it to promote the deployment of collaborative robots for laboratory automation and thus improve the experimental efficiency without significantly customizing a laboratory environment.Note to Practitioners-The system presented in the paper helps to promote low-frequency, high-repetition biochemical experiments. Such experiments were difficult to be performed automatically. For one thing, they are temporal. It is undesirable to spare limited lab space for special-purpose machines. For the other, such experiments require a repeated operation. Employing humans to carry out the experiments is difficult. The integrated robotic manipulator presented in this paper solves the problem using a vertical articulated robot. With the support of the proposed planning and error correction methods, the robot can be placed in narrow lab space and set up quickly for lowfrequency, high-repetition experiments. Also, it may be set up together with existing automation devices for simultaneous liquid dispensing and examination. Interested practitioners may find an example of the robot working with a plant phenotyping system for screening chemicals in the supplementary video.

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