Robotic laboratory automation platform based on mobile agents for flexible clinical tests

Abstract

In this research, we propose an innovative robotic platform for clinical tests suitable for small or medium sized laboratories. The proposed robotic platform, called “BioRobot platform”, is composed of multiple mobile agents which deliver microplates from one site to another in the platform, a miniature robotic arm, microplate loaders, photometry scanner or other testing devices, and an incubator where mobile agents reside depending on various tests. The BioRobot platform not only provides flexibility in tests by carrying out various clinical tests simultaneously through multiple mobile agents, but also increases productivity by having controllable throughput according to amount of tests. Also, to minimizes the delay time and provides parallel processing, the novel reduced idle time scheduling algorithm is implemented in the platform. The performance of the BioRobot platform is experimentally tested and its feasibility is validated.