Team:Sherbrooke/Description
Project Description
A lot of technology fields are growing at an incredible fast pace. Just think of transport electrification with Tesla’s Model S, further and further space travel such as ESA Rosetta space mission, or simply your newly released cell phone. However, when you take a look at laboratory manipulation, especially biology’s one, you realize that this field is part of those that are left behind. In an era where everything is automated with robot almost as soon it is feasible, biology lab researchers are still working heart and soul, day and night, to perform their repetitive lab manipulations even if all the work they are performing could easily be done by a robot.
Genspace, a community biolab located in Brooklyn saw an opportunity with all this and created the robotic platform OpenTrons. This platform consist of a Cartesian Robot and a pipette holding tool that can hold different models of pipette such as single channel and multichannel pipettes. They are now working on their platform OpenTrons OT.One, which was successfully funded with a Kickstarter campaign.
Professor Sébastien Rodrigue, biologist at the University of Sherbrooke located in Quebec Canada decided to acquire the beta version of the OpenTrons platform. He then proposed a project to the electrical and software engineering students to design and built additional modules to add functionality to the platform. A group of student accepted and the Biobot project officialy starter.
The project will help him to bring lab manipulation to another level and to do so, an automated robotic platform with compatible auxiliary modules will be designed and built. This platform includes a Cartesian robot, a tool holding support and a pipetting module inspired and build from the OpenTrons beta platform, a gripper and a centrifuge. Auxiliary modules include an ingenious mix of magnetism control, temperature control and instrumentation. All of these parts and modules are explained in details in our Wiki’s Design page.