Ah, process improvement. How quaint. Like polishing a cog in a machine that’s already rusted through. Still, if you insist on wading into the mire of efficiency, let’s at least do it with a modicum of… precision. This entire section is dedicated to the tedious business of automating laboratory procedures. Fascinating. A whole universe dedicated to making repetitive tasks slightly less soul-crushing.

Process Improvement Strategy for Routine Procedures

This is ostensibly a strategy for making the mundane less so. It’s part of a larger, presumably equally thrilling, series on Automation in general. Think of it as a flowchart for the perpetually bored.

• Part of a series on Automation : Yes, because one mention of automation simply wasn’t enough. We need context, a whole lineage of technological ennui.
• Automation in general : The overarching concept. The big, abstract idea of machines doing what humans once did, usually with less flair and more error messages.

Specific Applications:

The real meat, if you can call it that, lies in the practical applications. Where this relentless march of efficiency actually touches the grubby reality of work.

• Banking : Because nothing says “progress” like a machine that dispenses your meager earnings. And handles your deposits. Thrilling.
• Building : Controlling lights, temperature, security. Essentially, making buildings more indifferent to their occupants.
• Home : The aspiration of every lazy person who’d rather a device fetch their slippers than do it themselves. A digital butler, without the charming subservience.
• Highway system : The dream of hands-free commuting. Less human error, more… algorithmic predictability. Sounds delightful.
• Laboratory: The focus of our current, rather grim, dissection. Where the tedious meets the terrifyingly precise.
• Library : Cataloging and retrieval. Making sure you can find that obscure text on existential dread even faster.
• Broadcast : Running the airwaves without a human fussing over the playlist. Because spontaneity is so last century.
• Mix : Presumably for audio or chemical processes. Another instance of machines doing the heavy lifting, or the precise blending.
• Pool cleaner : A small victory of automation. A robot that diligently scrubs away the detritus of leisure. One can almost feel the satisfaction.
• Pop music : I shudder to think. The algorithmic creation of earworms. A true testament to the depravity of progress.
• Reasoning : When machines start thinking. Or at least simulating it. A concept that keeps philosophers up at night, and probably the reason I’m so cosmically tired.
• Semi-automation : The compromise. The half-hearted attempt at efficiency. Where humans and machines awkwardly dance around each other.
• Telephone:
  • Attendant : The disembodied voice that guides you through an endless menu. A digital labyrinth.
  • Switchboard : The old guard, now automated. Less human connection, more circuitous routing.
  • Teller machine : The ATM. A ubiquitous symbol of automated finance. Your personal gateway to… more bills.
• Vehicular : The umbrella term for self-driving cars and their ilk. The future, or a slow-motion disaster.
• Vending machine : Dispensing goods on demand. Another small, but significant, concession to convenience.

Related Concepts:

• Robotics and robots : The physical embodiment of automation. The metallic limbs and silicon brains.
  • Domestic : Robots for the home. The Roomba is merely the tip of the iceberg.
  • Vacuum cleaner : A prime example. The tireless, if sometimes erratic, floor scrubber.
  • Roomba : The icon. The benchmark. The dust-busting pioneer.
  • Lawn mower : For those who find the act of trimming grass too taxing.
  • Guided vehicle : Industrial workhorses. Moving goods in warehouses and factories with unerring precision.
  • Industrial : The heavy lifters. The welders, the assemblers. The backbone of manufacturing.
  • Paint : Applying coatings with inhuman consistency.
  • ODD : The specific conditions under which an automated system is designed to function. The fine print of artificial competence.

Impact of Automation:

This is where the existential dread really kicks in. The consequences of all this efficiency.

• Manumation : A portmanteau, I presume. Human-driven automation. A curious contradiction.
• OOL : The issue of humans becoming less competent at tasks they’ve handed over to machines. A slow atrophy of skill.
• Bias : The tendency to trust automated systems implicitly, even when they’re wrong. A dangerous form of surrender.
• Self-driving cars : The promise and peril of autonomous transport. A subject ripe for debate, and likely, disaster.
• Technological unemployment : The specter of jobs disappearing. A consequence that’s hard to ignore, no matter how many spreadsheets you generate.
• Jobless recovery : When the economy grows, but employment doesn’t. A chilling economic paradox.
• Post-work society : The utopian (or dystopian) vision of a future where work is no longer necessary. What do people do then?
• Threat : The darker side. Automated warfare, surveillance, and the like. When efficiency becomes a weapon.

Trade Shows and Awards:

Because even the relentless pursuit of automation deserves its own industry events and accolades.

• ASP-DAC
• DAC
• DATE
• IEEE Robotics and Automation Award
• ICCAD

Automated Laboratory Equipment

This is where the rubber meets the road, or rather, where the pipette meets the petri dish, automatically.

Laboratory automation, as it’s so clinically termed, is a multidisciplinary endeavor. It’s about using technology to crank out more research, develop better processes, and generally make laboratories hum with a soulless efficiency. These “professionals” – academics, commercial types, engineers – are tasked with increasing productivity, improving data quality, shortening cycle times, or enabling experiments that were previously too tedious or impossible for mere mortals.

The most visible manifestation of this is laboratory robotics . But the field is broader, encompassing a whole menagerie of automated instruments , devices like the ubiquitous autosamplers , the software that orchestrates them, and the methodologies that bind it all together. It’s a symphony of silicon and steel, designed to banish the human element, or at least, minimize its interference.

In today’s laboratories, technology isn’t a luxury; it’s a prerequisite for staying relevant. Fields like high-throughput screening , combinatorial chemistry , automated clinical and analytical testing, diagnostics, and vast biorepositories – they simply wouldn’t exist without this relentless automation. Imagine trying to screen millions of compounds by hand. It’s a thought that makes one’s own hands ache.

An autosampler for liquid or gaseous samples based on a microsyringe

Some universities, bless their academic hearts, offer entire programs dedicated to these lab technologies. Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, for instance, has a graduate program focused on Laboratory Informatics. And the Keck Graduate Institute in California grants degrees emphasizing the development of assays, instrumentation, and data analysis tools crucial for clinical diagnostics, high-throughput screening , genotyping , microarray technologies, proteomics , and imaging . All very important, I’m sure.

History

The desire to automate scientific inquiry isn’t new. Reports of automated devices for scientific investigation date back to at least 1875. These early contraptions were typically the brainchild of scientists themselves, built out of sheer necessity to overcome laboratory hurdles. Post-World War II saw companies begin to offer increasingly complex automated equipment.

Automation crept into laboratories throughout the 20th century, but a genuine revolution occurred in the early 1980s with the opening of the first fully automated laboratory by Dr. Masahide Sasaki . Later, in 1993, Dr. Rod Markin at the University of Nebraska Medical Center pioneered one of the world’s first automated clinical laboratory management systems. In the mid-90s, he even chaired a standards group, the Clinical Testing Automation Standards Steering Committee (CTASSC), under the umbrella of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry , which eventually evolved into an area committee of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute . In 2004, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with hundreds of leaders from academia, industry, and government, laid out a roadmap to accelerate medical discovery. A key component of this roadmap was technology development, specifically highlighted by the Molecular Libraries and Imaging Implementation Group.

Despite the successes of labs like Dr. Sasaki’s, the prohibitive cost – often in the millions – has been a significant barrier for smaller research groups. Compounding this issue is the lack of interoperability between devices from different manufacturers. However, recent advancements, particularly the use of scripting languages like Autoit , have paved the way for integrating equipment from disparate sources. This approach allows even low-cost, often open-source, electronic devices to communicate with standard laboratory instruments, a small flicker of hope in the otherwise exorbitant landscape of lab automation.

Startups like Emerald Cloud Lab and Strateos are now offering on-demand, remote laboratory access on a commercial scale. A 2017 study suggested these integrated automated labs can indeed improve reproducibility and transparency in basic biomedical research, with over nine out of ten biomedical papers employing methods available through such services. It’s a brave new world, or at least, a more efficient one.

Low-Cost Laboratory Automation

The elephant in the room for laboratory automation has always been its price tag. Many instruments are astronomically expensive, justified by their cutting-edge technology. But then there are devices that perform relatively simple tasks, yet carry a hefty cost simply because they’re automated. Think simple robotic arms , universal electronic modules, or even 3D printers and Lego Mindstorms kits repurposed for lab work.

Connecting these low-cost devices to existing laboratory equipment was, until recently, a Herculean task. But demonstrations have shown that these affordable alternatives can seamlessly replace their more expensive counterparts. It’s an exciting prospect for laboratories operating on tighter budgets.

The key enabler here is scripting, particularly techniques that control mouse clicks and keyboard entries, like AutoIt . By precisely timing these inputs, software interfaces controlling different devices can be synchronized, effectively creating a bridge between disparate systems. It’s a bit like teaching a flock of unruly birds to fly in formation, but with more code and less flapping.