New Capabilities of EvoBot: A Modular, Open-Source Liquid-Handling Robot

摘要

We introduce a robot developed to perform feedback-based experiments, such as droplet experiments, a common type of experiments in artificial chemical life research. These experiments are particularly well suited for automation because they often stretch over long periods of time, possibly hours, and often require that the human takes action in response to observed events such as changes in droplet size, count, shape, or clustering or declustering of multiple droplets. Our robot is designed to monitor long-term experiments and, based on the feedback from the experiment, interact with it. The combination of precise automation, accurately collected experiment data, and integrated analysis and modeling software makes real-time interaction with the experiment feasible, as opposed to traditional offline processing of experiments. Last but not least, we believe the low cost of our platform can promote artificial life research. Furthermore, prevalently, findings from an experiment will inspire redesign for novel experiments. In addition, the robot's open-source software enables easy modification of experiments. We will cover two case studies for application of our robot in feedback-based experiments and demonstrate how our robot can not only automate these experiments, collect data, and interact with the experiments intelligently but also enable chemists to perform formerly infeasible experiments.