Increasing the level of automation in pharmaceutical laboratories and production facilities plays a crucial role in delivering medicine to patients. However, the particular requirements of this field make it challenging to adapt cutting-edge technologies present in other industries. This article provides an overview of relevant approaches and how they can be utilized in the pharmaceutical industry, especially in development laboratories. Recent advancements include the application of flexible mobile manipulators capable of handling complex tasks. However, integrating devices from many different vendors into an end-to-end automation system is complicated due to the diversity of interfaces. Therefore, various approaches for standardization are considered in this article, and a concept is proposed for taking them a step further. This concept enables a mobile manipulator with a vision system to "learn" the pose of each device and - utilizing a barcode - fetch interface information from a universal cloud database. This information includes control and communication protocol definitions and a representation of robot actions needed to operate the device. In order to define the movements in relation to the device, devices have to feature - besides the barcode - a fiducial marker as standard. The concept will be elaborated following appropriate research activities in follow-up papers.

Science laboratory automation enables accelerated discovery in life sciences and materials. However, it requires interdisciplinary collaboration to address challenges such as robust and flexible autonomy, reproducibility, throughput, standardization, the role of human scientists, and ethics. This article highlights these issues, reflecting perspectives from leading experts in laboratory automation across different disciplines of the natural sciences.

The Laboratory Automation Plug & Play (LAPP) framework is an over-arching reference architecture concept for the integration of robots in life science laboratories. The plug & play nature lies in the fact that manual configuration is not required, including the teaching of the robots. In this paper a digital twin (DT) based concept is proposed that outlines the types of information that must be provided for each relevant component of the system. In particular, for the devices interfacing with the robot, the robot positions must be defined beforehand in a device-attached coordinate system (CS) by the vendor. This CS must be detectable by the vision system of the robot by means of optical markers placed on the front side of the device. With that, the robot is capable of tending the machine by performing the pick-and-place type transportation of standard sample carriers. This basic use case is the primary scope of the LAPP-DT framework. The hardware scope is limited to simple benchtop and mobile manipulators with parallel grippers at this stage. This paper first provides an overview of relevant literature and state-of-the-art solutions, after which it outlines the framework on the conceptual level, followed by the specification of the relevant DT parameters for the robot, for the devices and for the facility. Finally, appropriate technologies and strategies are identified for the implementation.

Supportive robotic solutions take over mundane, but essential tasks from human workforce in biomedical research and development laboratories. The newest technologies in collaborative and mobile robotics enable the utilization in the human-centered and low-structured environment. Their adaptability, however, is hindered by the additional complexity that they introduce. In our paper we aim to entangle the convoluted laboratory robot integration architectures. We begin by hierarchically decomposing the laboratory workflows, and mapping the activity representations to layers and components of the automation control architecture. We elaborate the framework in detail on the example of pick-and-place labware transportation - a crucial supportive step, which we identified as the number one area of interest among experts of the field. Our concept proposal serves as a reference architecture model, the key principles of which were used in reference implementations, and are in line with international standardization efforts.

In recent years, industrial processes have been conquered by networked, communicating, and, in some cases, decision-making tools. This paradigm change is often referred to as Industry 4.0 by professionals in the economy, IT, and industry. Although somewhat lagging, the same process is accelerating in the field of laboratory automation as well. Automated devices and robotic solutions are present in this area since decades; however, extensive system integration has only gained importance recently. Automated laboratories utilize a large variety of devices that are becoming interconnected and are more and more often integrated into external control systems; however, standard communication protocols are often lacking. This paper discusses innovative software solutions in the context of a biopharmaceutical process development laboratory: firstly in a hierarchical distinction and then in the aspect of their function. Different approaches for system integration are discussed, including two specific implementation examples.

The fast evolution in computational and sensor technologies brings previously niche solutions to a wider userbase. As such, 3D reconstruction technologies are reaching new use-cases in scientific and everyday areas where they were not present before. Cost-effective and easy-to-use solutions include camera-based 3D scanning techniques, such as photogrammetry. This paper provides an overview of the available solutions and discusses in detail the depth-image based Real-time Appearance-based Mapping (RTAB-Map) technique as well as a smartphone-based solution that utilises ARCore, the Augmented Reality (AR) framework of Google. To qualitatively compare the two 3D reconstruction technologies, a simple length measurement-based method was applied with a purpose-designed reference object. The captured data were then analysed by a processing algorithm. In addition to the experimental results, specific case studies are briefly discussed, evaluating the applicability based on the capabilities of the technologies. As such, the paper presents the use-case of interior surveying in an automated laboratory as well as an example for using the discussed techniques for landmark surveying. The major findings are that point clouds created with these technologies provide a direction- and shape-accurate model, but those contain mesh continuity errors, and the estimated scale factor has a large standard deviation.