Lab Automation

LAB AUTOMATION RESOURCE GUIDE
The Lab of Tomorrow
What might the lab of the future look like?
Where will automation fit in? Here are some predictions.
by Laurence Painell
The next five years
Despite the speed of technological advancements,
introducing new systems and processes in a laboratory
can take time. Over the next five years, it might not look
as though labs are changing significantly—but if you look
beneath the surface, some major developments are likely to
be taking place.
• The cloud will become the norm even in regulated
environments
• Integration between software, services, and physical
devices will be critical to providing a backbone for
laboratory technologies
• Collaboration and outsourcing will become
commonplace
• Data will become increasingly open and available across
a given lab or business
• The keyboard will be replaced with voice recognition
technology
• As the technology matures, 3-D printing will work its
way further into prototyping and manufacturing
EXPERT TIP:
THE SECRET TO
AUTOMATION SUCCESS
“I think the secret to automation success is two-fold. First,
know your extraction method really well and think about
how you would perform it from a robot’s perspective.
The method has to be automatable and no robot will be
as perceptive or responsive to variations in the process as
a human operator. Second, be the master of your robot.
Vendor companies will provide programming support, but
to guarantee success you need at least one staff member
who is capable of programming the instrument. Vendors
may be experts at programming, but they are unlikely to
know your process as intimately as you do.”
Rohan Steel, PhD, project leader in the Biological
Research Unit at Racing Analytical Services, Ltd.
(RASL), in Flemington, Australia
• AI and machine learning will becoming more prevalent
• Labs and businesses could decide to unlock their legacy
data for the greater good
• The internet of things (IoT) will create a steep
change in efficiency by allowing for bidirectional
communication between instruments, robots, and the
systems and services used
• It will be interesting to see how augmented reality
develops over the next decade—but it’s something
we could see slowly integrated into the laboratory
environment
The next 10 years
This is where we start to break from certainty and start to
look at changes that we expect to see based on the current
evolution of technologies.
• Radio-frequency identification RFID tags that allow the
automatic reading of data will become cheap enough to
be ubiquitous
Lab Manager 2017
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