Toward Lab Automation Drones for Micro-plate Delivery in High Throughput Systems

Abstract

In this paper, the author presents a lab automation drone concept design for high throughput systems(HTS). A 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) parallel manipulator and parallel sensorized gripper are affixed together to a rotorcraft. The manipulator-gripper allows dexterously delivery of micro-plates broadly used for sample-testing in high throughput systems. For testing and evaluation, the concept design is deployed in two pick-and-place experiments using micro-plates. First the manipulator-gripper system is attached to a gantry crane system, then it is tested on a quadcopter under manual flight within motion capture space. The results demonstrate the viability of the design and point towards future work on stability controls for autonomous flight.