SBIR Phase II: A Modular and Reconfigurable Liquid-handling Toolkit for Laboratory Research

Award ID: 2126656

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a highly customizable, programmable system that allows researchers to program and run experiments across wide-ranging use cases. Physical- and life-science R&D personnel frequently conduct repetitive, long-duration experiments manually with unconnected benchtop equipment. A tailored flexible automation system would serve multiple industries, including chemicals, specialty polymers, and biotechnology. The goal is to optimize the flexibility that researchers need to complete their studies while minimizing the efforts they expend on equipment and development customization. This system will bring the benefits of automation found in large-scale manufacturing facilities to the laboratory benchtop-scale in terms of (1) decoupling researchers time from their productivity and (2) enabling modern programmatic approaches for collaborating and building directly upon previously programmed protocols. This will accelerate the research and development enterprise. The intellectual merit of this project is the development and commercialization of a system that makes laboratory protocol automation accessible to researchers. The system will make automation accessible by addressing the most difficult elements of system integration (communication timing, command timing, a user-interface, data persistence) so that researchers need only focus on the protocols. The system hardware unifies the disparate types of input and output (I/O) for multiple types of benchtop lab equipment. The software front-end provides an accessible Python application programming interface (API) for the network of connected equipment. The software application handles command queuing and execution for a users customized script. Used in combination, these capabilities result in a flexible network of plug-and-play laboratory devices that seamlessly communicate with each other to execute complex protocols. The research objectives are to 1) establish a robust and scalable software and hardware architecture, and 2) develop, test, and implement assets to accelerate user adoption. The anticipated result is a system that enables a researcher to select any combination of benchtop lab equipment from the device library, configure the equipment into a custom setup, select and modify template protocols, and execute specialized protocols in a matter of minutes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Benaiah Schrag