Development of robotic laboratory automation platform with intelligent mobile agents for clinical chemistry

Abstract

In this research, we propose an innovative robotic platform for clinical tests suitable for small or medium sized laboratories using small-sized multiple mobile robots and a robotic arm. The proposed robotic platform is referred to as “BioRobot platform”. The BioRobot platform not only provides flexibility in test process by carrying out various clinical tests simultaneously through multiple mobile agents, but also increases productivity by having controllable throughput according to amount of tests. Therefore, the various algorithms which are related to robotic technologies have been applied in this platform to operate the entire hardware and several mobile agents simultaneously. To evaluate the performance of the BioRobot platform, various control methods are implemented, which provides parallel processing and scalability. The feasibility of the BioRobot platform with three mobile robotic agents is validated through preliminary experiments.