Modular Science is Building Hardware and Software for Lab Automation (Video)

Modular Science is something Tim Lord spotted at last month's O'Reilly Solid Conference in San Francisco. Its founder, Peter Sand, has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He's scheduled to speak at this year's OSCON, and his speaker blurb for that conference says, "He is the founder of ManyLabs, a nonprofit focused on teaching math and science using sensors and simulations. Peter also founded Modular Science, a company working on hardware and software tools for science labs. He has given talks at Science Hack Day, Launch Edu, and multiple academic conferences, including SIGGRAPH." And now he's also been interviewed on Slashdot. Note that there are plenty of lab automation systems out there. Peter is working on one that is not only "an order of magnitude cheaper" than similar devices, but is also easy to modify and expand. It's the sort of system that would fit well not just in a college-level lab, but in a high school lab or a local makerspace. (Alternate Video Link)

Tim: Peter, what is it that were looking at here. Its very interesting looking kind of a stationary robot here.

Peter: Yeah, its a machine for a biology lab that has a pipetter, it can pick up vials, its got a centrifuge, so its a machine for doing what you would do on a biology workbench.

Tim: Now why this machine? What does it bring that other machines in a biology that dont?

Peter: Well, the main advantage of it is that its more modular, more hackable, more open. So that you can modify it easily to do whatever experiments you want to do. Theres a lot of existing robots for biology labs, but theyre lot more expensive; theyre say $100,000, and theyre proprietary. They have closed interfaces. Its very hard to change them if you want to. So thats why what were trying to do is make it easier to modify and customize these machines.

Tim: Can you talk about what its capabilities are?

Peter: So this particular machine it can do pipetting, it can pick up vials, it can take the lid off of a vial. And it can do centrifuging, so these are all sort of basic building blocks of a biology lab procedure.

Tim: What sort of components does it take to make all that happen, what are your hardware, what are your software?

Peter: Yeah. So, its mainly based on Arduinos and stepper motors and stepper motor drivers. Theres an Arduino for each degree of freedom and those are talking to the coders, checking limit switches, driving the motors and those are all talking to each other in a serial chain to a computer, and the computer is monitoring the overall state of machine and telling you what to do next.

Tim: Now I understand you use machine vision for some of the tests like locating vials.

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Modular Science is Building Hardware and Software for Lab Automation (Video)