Robot gets DNA as life sciences advance

Citation

(2002), "Robot gets DNA as life sciences advance", Industrial Robot, Vol. 29 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2002.04929fad.007

Robot gets DNA as life sciences advance

Robot gets DNA as life sciences advance

Keywords: Chemical analysis, Robots

Industrial automation technologies are playing an increasing role in bringing modern healthcare standards to more and more people around the world. Life science specialist Micromass has teamed up with automation systems engineers J and C Consultants and machine actuator manufacturer Hoerbiger-Origa to reduce the cost of DNA sample analysis.

Production of Micromass’s DNA sampling machine is ramping up at manufacturers J and C Consultants, as laboratories throughout the world are adopting through-the-night unmanned working. At the heart of this sophisticated machine is a multi-axis robot, built from Hoerbiger-Origa actuators, which mounts the sample plates into a 50-plate cassette ready for auto loading into the mass spectrometry analyser (see Plate 7).

Micromass prides itself on being at the cutting edge of mass spectrometry for the health and life science sectors, helping to reduce costs and make medical excellence available to a far greater proportion of the world’s population. Mass spectrometry is a key enabling technique in analytical science, allowing chemical entities such as functional proteins and pharmaceuticals to be identified and characterised by exactly measuring their molecular masses.

Plate 7 The micromass DNA sampling machine

In order to design and produce sophisticated equipment in compressed time frames Micromass has partnered with J and C Consultants to develop its latest high throughput DNA analysis machine, which is capable of working unattended for many hours at a time. Micromass has already developed spectrometry technologies, and used J and C’s complementary skills to develop automated loading and unloading systems.

At one of the early design meetings Micromass suggested that it would be advantageous if the autoloader could fit within the footprint of the spectrometer. This defined a tight space envelope, into which J and C’s robot would have to fit, which led to the decision to adopt Hoerbiger-Origa’s compact and efficient actuators for its motion axes.

The sample plates are 55 mm × 4l mm, made of stainless steel and fitted with three feet on their underside to facilitate stacking. The robot stacks these one on top of another to fill the cassette. J and C senior partner Phil Johnson explains: “To do this securely we wanted to stall the robot’s drive each time it stacked on another plate. This meant we could not use stepper motors, and compressed air was not an option because it is not available in many bio laboratories. This made servos our motor of choice.”

Careful design allowed J and C to generate the required fairly complicated loading motion using only two linear axes, one vertical and one horizontal, a degree of simplicity that suited the space constraints of the project well. For these Johnson called in manufacturer Hoerbiger-Origa for detailed design assistance, and the decision was made to specify OSP25s for both axes.

For further information, please contact: Ray Barnes, Hoerbiger-Origa Limited, Tewkesbury Industrial Estate, Gloucestershire, GL20 8ND, UK. Tel: 01684 850000; Fax: 01684 850555; E-mail: rav.barnes@hoerbiger-origa.com; Web site: www.hoerbiger-origia.com