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DEResearch laboratories
Life Science
The laboratory where the protocol changes on Tuesday. Where a run has to reach three in the morning and somebody has to be there. Automation for research labs starts from what your day actually looks like, not from a catalogue.
Where the hours actually go
Four things research laboratories tell us they lose time on — none of which is the science.
Walking, not pipetting
A scientist on a PhD salary spends a measurable part of the week carrying racks between two rooms. It is the least skilled task in the building and it is done by the most qualified person in it.
Instrument time that idles overnight
The reader, the incubator and the climate chamber were the expensive purchases. They stand still from six in the evening until eight the next morning because nobody is there to load them.
Results that are hard to reconstruct
When a plate was moved by three different people over two shifts, the handling is the part of the record that is hardest to reproduce — and the part a reviewer asks about.
Automation that was quoted for a different lab
Most lab automation is priced and designed for a diagnostic line: fixed route, identical batches, a rebuild of the room. A research laboratory that asks for a quote gets an answer to a question it did not ask.
Why research laboratories are their own case
A diagnostic laboratory and a research laboratory both handle samples, and there the similarity ends. The diagnostic lab optimises a route it will run again tomorrow. The research lab is measured on the experiment it has not run yet.
That difference decides what automation can look like. A fixed lab line pays for itself through repetition, so it needs the repetition to exist. A research group changes its protocol between projects, sometimes between weeks, and a system that has to be re-engineered each time is a system that will be switched off by March.
The three questions worth asking a vendor
Does it take my labware, or does it need its own? If the answer involves re-racking into a proprietary carrier, the automation has added a manual step in order to remove one.
Does it join my software, or replace it? A group with a mature LIMS or ELN has years of method history in it. Automation that requires a different data home is not a tool, it is a migration project.
Who commissions it, and who commissions it again in six months? If a protocol change means booking an integrator, the running cost is not on the quote.
Where pharmaceutical laboratories differ
Pharmaceutical R&D sits inside this group rather than beside it. The sample mix moves the way a university group’s does; what gets added is documentation, not throughput.
Two things follow from that. The value of automation here is partly the record it produces, not only the hours it gives back. And anything that cannot be explained to an auditor is a liability, however fast it runs.
We do not sell a validated GxP system. Qualification happens in your quality system; we supply the documentation that feeds it. Any supplier who prints “GMP-compliant” on a robot datasheet should be asked which document that refers to.
Where this fits
Academic and institutional research groups, pharmaceutical and biotech R&D, method development, and quality laboratories that behave like research labs because their sample mix keeps moving. Typically laboratories with instruments worth automating around and too little floor space to install a line.
Proof
Filmed in a working research laboratory, together with Fraunhofer IPA
What you are watching is not a render and not a showroom. It is a research laboratory at Fraunhofer IPA: benches in use, a climate chamber, racks of amber vials, a scientist who keeps working while the robot passes behind her.
That is the honest test for a research lab. Not whether a robot can move, but whether it can move through a room that was never designed for it — past the stool someone left out, around the trolley that was not there yesterday.
Setup
Commissioned by the people who work there
The time-lapse shows a complete commissioning: position the robot, teach the handover points, start the workflow. No robotics expertise, no integrator on a day rate, no re-plumbing of the laboratory.
This matters more than it sounds. A deployment that depends on an external specialist also stops when that specialist is booked somewhere else. This one does not.
The robot underneath
uLab Mobile — the platform this runs on
The solution described here runs on uLab Mobile: a mobile base with a collaborative arm and 3D perception, already in daily service in laboratory medicine.
The difference on this page is the configuration, not the machine. A diagnostic line wants throughput on a fixed route. A research laboratory wants a pair of hands that copes with a protocol that changed on Tuesday.
Responsibly built
Sourced in Europe
Majority of components are sourced in Europe.
Repairable
Efficient support team always available. Robot repair centers close to you in Germany, France and USA.
Recyclable
We value the concept of circular economy. The electronics & raw materials used for our robots are reused & recycled with a growing focus on lowering our energy consumption.
Safety and data protection
Floor plans, maps and scans recorded in your laboratory belong to you and are handled under the GDPR. Nothing about the layout of your building leaves it.
Have a look at your laboratory with us
Describe your two most repetitive transports. An engineer replies within two working days and says plainly whether this fits — including when it does not.
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