TY - JOUR
T1 - EvoBot: An Open-Source, Modular, Liquid Handling Robot for Scientific Experiments
AU - Faina, Andres
AU - Nejati, Brian
AU - Støy, Kasper
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Commercial liquid handling robots are rarely appropriate when tasks change often, which is the case in the early stages of biochemical research. In order to address it, we have developed EvoBot, a liquid handling robot, which is open-source and employs a modular design. The combination of an open-source and a modular design is particularly powerful because functionality is divided into modules with simple, well-defined interfaces, hence customisation of modules is possible without detailed knowledge of the entire system. Furthermore, the modular design allows end-users to only produce and assemble the modules that are relevant for their specific application. Hence, time and money are not wasted on functionality that is not needed. Finally, modules can easily be reused. In this paper, we describe the EvoBot modular design and through scientific experiments such as basic liquid handling, nurturing of microbial fuel cells, and droplet chemotaxis experiments document how functionality is increased one module at a time with a significant amount of reuse. In addition to providing wet-labs with an extendible, open-source liquid handling robot, we also think that modularity is a key concept that is likely to be useful in other robots developed for scientific purposes.
AB - Commercial liquid handling robots are rarely appropriate when tasks change often, which is the case in the early stages of biochemical research. In order to address it, we have developed EvoBot, a liquid handling robot, which is open-source and employs a modular design. The combination of an open-source and a modular design is particularly powerful because functionality is divided into modules with simple, well-defined interfaces, hence customisation of modules is possible without detailed knowledge of the entire system. Furthermore, the modular design allows end-users to only produce and assemble the modules that are relevant for their specific application. Hence, time and money are not wasted on functionality that is not needed. Finally, modules can easily be reused. In this paper, we describe the EvoBot modular design and through scientific experiments such as basic liquid handling, nurturing of microbial fuel cells, and droplet chemotaxis experiments document how functionality is increased one module at a time with a significant amount of reuse. In addition to providing wet-labs with an extendible, open-source liquid handling robot, we also think that modularity is a key concept that is likely to be useful in other robots developed for scientific purposes.
KW - Liquid handling robots
KW - Open-source robots
KW - Modular Robots
KW - Microbial Fuel Cells
KW - Droplets
KW - Evolutionary Algorithms
U2 - https://doi.org/10.3390/app10030814
DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/app10030814
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1454-5101
VL - 10
JO - Applied Sciences
JF - Applied Sciences
IS - 3
M1 - 814
ER -