A general robot control system for automatic chemical analysis

Advances in instrumentation have led to increasing interest in automatic chemical analyses. Unfortunately, the potential flexibility of robot systems can often not be exploited because of complex programming languages and poor user-interface. These factors generally limit the use of laboratory robots to a few repetitive tasks. This paper describes the development of a general robot control system for automatic chemical analysis. The program is written in Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic and runs in the Microsoft Windows environment. The analytical workspace is designed by selection of an object's icon followed by its desired orientation. Positioning of this object is then performed using a ‘drag and drop’ procedure. The robotic procedure is set-up by selection of items of apparatus and their associated actions. The performance of the system is demonstrated by the determination for caffeine in tablet formulations using a continuous dilution and calibration scheme.