As technology advances, society continues to innovate new ways in which it can be integrated into our life and work to benefit us. The concept, and practice, of lab automation has been around since the 1950s, but today the landscape is much more complex.
There are a lot of challenges that lab automation is setting out to fix. It also meets multiple opportunities to make the work of a scientist even better, quicker and more efficient than ever before.
Liquid handling systems
A vast number of experiments across the world require liquid handling in some capacity. Automated liquid handling provides multiple benefits over manual pipetting – a task which is typically time consuming, error prone, and can result in repetitive strain industries.
Automated liquid handling systems allow scientists to process a higher number of samples, providing a higher throughput in shorter time frames. These systems can also reduce errors before they become a problem, saving valuable samples and better avoiding cross-contamination.
Read more about how automation can improve lab safety.
Chemical synthesis reactors
The point of automation is to enable scalable and repetitive processes. Chemical synthesis reactors can do all this, and in a safe way.
An ideal solution for the chemists in the room, automation has taken chemical synthesis into its hands. Providing a novel approach to synthetic steps, automated chemical reactors can precisely control reaction parameters. They can also execute recipes, enhancing reproducibility for chemists.
These innovative automation tools can generate more information per experiment, speed up time-to-market cycles and can integrate easily into workflows – increasing overall productivity as a result.
There are automated chemical reactors that can be used to suit a variety of applications including impurity proofing, crystallization and recrystallization, and hydrogenation reactions, to name a few.
Lab automation software
Lab automation software is helping scientists with many pre and post analytical tasks. Lab automation software is broad and can encapsulate a lot of different applications. This might be in combination with a piece of hardware, processing the data captured through it. It can also help with any existing digitally stored data.
Lab automation software helps scientists with transcribing large quantities of data. It can improve data integrity and can help organisations to unlock program-level and experiment-level insights.
Interested in learning more about the history of lab automation?
Full workbench automation
Above are examples of solutions that automate particular tasks in the lab. One solution that is a little less popular than its partial automation counterparts is full workbench automation. This automates – surprise – entire workflows, linking processes together using a combination of hardware and software.
Some of the benefits of this is that it automates workflows end-to-end so scientists can essentially step away altogether and focus their time elsewhere. It also allows for effective scheduling, provides less scope for error and, due to potential 24/7 run times, can increase operation time while reducing time to turnover results.
Computer vision empowered automation
Through computer vision, Lumi works to automate data capture within the lab. The LabEye camera module captures operational data associated with experiments, observations and material usage. The technology also automates the information for you to help you to gain deeper insights.
As the first of its kind, Lumi is the ultimate lab assistant, giving scientists an extra pair of eyes and ears, and brain. From research to production, the automation solution helps organisations to save time, better collaborate and monitor experiments remotely.
Complex problems can be solved quicker through Lumi’s machine learning capabilities and through the increased reproducibility it offers. This helps scientists to reach new and exciting discoveries.
If you’d like to know more about Lumi as a computer vision lab automation solution, then feel free to contact Reach Industries today. We can have a chat about what Lumi does, how it can help you, and any other questions you have.