The terms ‘robot’ or ‘robotic’, which are often used interchangeably with automation, received negligible use until the mid 90’s and then showed a more marked elevation ( Figure 1). Evidence from the proportional use of the terms ‘automation’ or ‘automated’ in the titles of PubMed listed articles does, however, exhibit a steady increase over the previous 4 decades. Well-meaning predictions of the cybernetic laboratory ( Beugelsdijk, 1991) and a robotic revolution ( Boyd, 2002) have, at the time of writing, yet to materialise in the majority of life science research laboratories. Further, we suggest that it could be accelerated by beginning with a more low-tech approach rather than striving too soon for fully autonomous systems. We further attempt to summarise why automation has had such a limited impact in our workplace ( Jessop-Fabre and Sonnenschein, 2019) and ask whether the solution to including more automation into everyday laboratory tasks may reside in greater communication between scientists and engineers. In this review, written from the perspective of an automation engineer now working in synthetic biology research and a Principal Investigator managing a research laboratory, we classify the current levels of automation in laboratories and highlight the benefits and limitations of its usage in research. Laboratories in a clinical setting have also experienced the benefits of adopting automation ( Hawker et al., 2018), increasing the speed and reliability of patient-specific data for use by clinicians ( Sarkozi et al., 2003 Lou et al., 2016). This is in contrast to industrial environments, where widespread investment in automation has allowed companies to maximise their outputs and increase profits ( Ravazzi and Villa, 2009). Many experimental procedures remain heavily reliant upon the individual researcher manually carrying out protocols at the research bench.
#History of automation scholar manual#
However, it is noticeable that a typical university research laboratory, often led by a single principal investigator, maintains a high level of manual manipulation in the form of undergraduate, postgraduate, post-doctoral and technical staff. Life science research conducted within academic institutions has also welcomed the ingress of mechanised equipment designed to automate a range of tasks. More recent advances in robotics and information technology have further automated processes that were once the sole domain of human brawn or brain ( Hasegawa, 2009). From generation to generation, mechanised tooling has replaced swathes of manual tasks. The progressive integration of automation into work environments has enhanced the production rates, efficiency and quality of an enormous array of industrial processes ( Hitomi, 1994 Autor, 2015). Automation in the research laboratory is likely to be an increasingly critical component of future research programs and will continue the trend of combining engineering and science expertise together to answer novel research questions. To fully exploit the potential of laboratory automation, future generations of scientists will require both engineering and biology skills. Academic and commercial developers of automation will increasingly need to design with an environmental awareness and an understanding that large high-tech robotic solutions may not be appropriate for laboratories with constrained financial and spatial resources. Growing the range of automation options suitable for research laboratories will require more flexible, modular and cheaper designs. Less immediately obvious are the accompanying limitations, including obsolescence and an inhibitory effect on the freedom to innovate. Automation, however, can bestow multiple benefits through improvements in reproducibility, researcher efficiency, clinical translation, and safety. Causes of this ‘automation gap’ are unique to academic research, with rigid short-term funding structures, high levels of protocol variability and a benevolent culture of investment in people over equipment. In contrast to industrial and clinical laboratory environments, the usage of automation to augment or replace manual tasks is limited. Protocols in the academic life science laboratory are heavily reliant on the manual manipulation of tools, reagents and instruments by a host of research staff and students. Deanery of Biomedical Science and Synthsys Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
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