Improving Liquid Handling Robot Throughput by means of Direct Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance

In Liquid Handling Robots that are properly balanced, the gantry robot utilization reaches close to 100%, meaning the robot is almost always moving. In such a situation, improving the move times of the robot can lead to significant throughput enhancements. In systems were (one of) the process steps is a gating factor, the designer should attempt to add parallel process steps to increase throughput. This article (and poster) shows how to implement a high-speed motion system on a Liquid Handling Robot gantry that is aware of system clearances so that it can start a planar (X/Y) move while a Z-axis move is still ongoing. By employing such a motion control solution, robot move times can be improved by 25% over conventional robot moves and over 50% compared to systems that only employ single axis moves.