A service robot for automating the sample management in biotechnological cell cultivations

In this paper we present a mobile robot system that is capable of automating the sample management in a biotechnological laboratory. The system consists of a mobile platform and a robot arm. It can navigate freely in the laboratory and operate standard devices needed for the sample management. The platform uses an extended Kalman filter for localization and the A∗ algorithm for path planning on a tangent graph computed from the laboratory’s map. Motion execution has been designed to be as predictable as possible to not irritate, disturb or harm human personnel. The robot arm uses color vision to detect devices and compensate for positioning errors. The parameters and tasks needed to operate the devices are specified in simple scripts to allow quick and easy adaptations to other situations.