Increasing the level of automation in pharmaceutical laboratories and production facilities plays a crucial role in delivering medicine to patients. However, the particular requirements of this field make it challenging to adapt cutting-edge technologies present in other industries. This article provides an overview of relevant approaches and how they can be utilized in the pharmaceutical industry, especially in development laboratories. Recent advancements include the application of flexible mobile manipulators capable of handling complex tasks. However, integrating devices from many different vendors into an end-to-end automation system is complicated due to the diversity of protocols. Therefore, various approaches for standardization have been considered, and a concept has been proposed for taking them a step further. This concept enables a mobile manipulator with a vision system to ``learn'' the pose of each device and - utilizing a barcode - fetch interface information from a universal cloud database. This information includes control and communication protocol definitions and a representation of robot actions needed to operate the device. In order to define the movements in relation to the device, devices have to feature - besides the barcode - a fiducial marker as standard. The concept will be elaborated following appropriate research activities in follow-up papers.
翻译:提高制药实验室和生产设施的自动化水平在向病人提供药品方面发挥着关键作用。然而,由于这一领域的特殊要求,调整其他行业的尖端技术具有挑战性。本条款概述了有关方法以及如何在制药业、特别是发展实验室使用这些技术。最近的进展包括应用能够处理复杂任务的灵活机动操纵器。然而,由于协议的多样性,将许多不同供应商的装置纳入端对端自动化系统的工作十分复杂。因此,考虑了各种标准化办法,并提出了进一步推行这些标准化的概念。这个概念使具有视觉系统的移动操纵器能够“清除”每个装置的外形,并利用条形码从通用云层数据库获取接口信息。这种信息包括控制和通信协议定义以及操作该装置所需的机器人行动说明。为了界定与装置有关的移动,除了条形码之外,装置还必须标出一种纤维标志作为标准。这一概念将在后续文件的适当研究活动之后加以阐述。