Beschreibung
This chapter discusses general issues of automated manipulation in medical and biotechnological lab processes. A categorization from the viewpoint of the accuracy is proposed, and relevant aspects from automation engineering are reviewed. To illustrate the discussion, a case study on colony picking is presented. This study starts with market analysis and concludes that there is a gap in the low-cost/mid throughput market. For this scenario, a portable desktop colony picker is presented that consists of a miniaturized parallel kinematic robot, a dedicated image processing system and an ergonomic graphical user interface. The article concludes that there remains considerable potential for such dedicated lab automation equipment. Particularly, more research into highly integrated system design for such scenarios is motivated in order to lower footprint, to increase portability, and to make investments into lab automation more effective for small to mid-size laboratories.
