Digital pipette: Open hardware for liquid transfer in self-driving laboratories

Abstract

Self-driving laboratories promise to democratize automated chemical laboratories. Accurate liquid handling is an essential operation in the context of chemical labs, and consequently a self-driving laboratory will require a robotic liquid handling and transfer. Although many pipettes are available for human scientists, robots cannot manipulate these pipettes due to the limitations of current robot gripper morphology. We propose an intuitive yet elegant design for a 3D-printed digital pipette designed for robots to carry out chemical experiments. Performance-evaluation experiments were carried out liquid transfer tasks. Our results show that robots with digital pipette could transfer liquids within 0.5% error. This error is comparable to the baseline set by commercially available human-handled pipettes.