>newground
Informatics graduate student Jianyong Zhu and the new robot
This past summer, Informatics Professor Douglas Perry and Engineering Professor José Ramos drove to Hershey, Pennsylvania. The mission: to bring a disassembled robot back to IUPUI and put it together again. With digital camera and notebooks in hand, they witnessed and photographed the robot as it was taken apart.
When Hershey Foods Corporation decided to donate the Zymark Pytechnology XP-class robot, many universities applied for it. But the staff at Hershey chose IUPUI because they believed the match was perfect. IUPUI is at the forefront of the new field of laboratory robotics, and the Laboratory Informatics Graduate Program is the first of its kind in the world. The robot enables professors to illustrate the principles of laboratory robotics in their classrooms.
Robots have been used in industrial applications for decades, but the laboratory is a newer venue. The teaching laboratory is newer yet. The robot in question resides on a 10’ x 8’ table with multiple workstations arrayed in a circle around it. At Hershey,
the robot was used to prepare flavor samples, often as many as 500 overnight, in order to be ready when Hershey scientists start their workday. The robot could measure and dispense liquids in precise amounts. Its other functions include compounding, vortexing, weighing, heating, capping and uncapping, and transferring samples.
As Perry offers, “The robot can be optimized to do the types and amount of tasks that would either be impossible or cost prohibitive for a human to do.”
That’s laboratory informatics in a nutshell.
>Geoffrey Pollock
Witness the robot in action.
Find out more about the School of Informatics at IUPUI and the Laboratory Informatics Graduate Program.