Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Robot Skill Learning For Sample Scraping

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model-free reinforcement learning approach to automate the delicate task of sample scraping in laboratory settings, enabling robots to perform fine-granular movements for sample retrieval in chemical workflows.

Contribution

The work presents the first reinforcement learning-based method for autonomous sample scraping, bridging simulation and real-world laboratory automation for complex manipulation tasks.

Findings

Successfully learned scraping policy in simulation

Achieved autonomous powder scraping on real robot

Demonstrated adaptability across different setups

Abstract

The use of laboratory robotics for autonomous experiments offers an attractive route to alleviate scientists from tedious tasks while accelerating material discovery for topical issues such as climate change and pharmaceuticals. While some experimental workflows can already benefit from automation, sample preparation is still carried out manually due to the high level of motor function and dexterity required when dealing with different tools, chemicals, and glassware. A fundamental workflow in chemical fields is crystallisation, where one application is polymorph screening, i.e., obtaining a three dimensional molecular structure from a crystal. For this process, it is of utmost importance to recover as much of the sample as possible since synthesising molecules is both costly in time and money. To this aim, chemists scrape vials to retrieve sample contents prior to imaging plate transfer. Automating this process is challenging as it goes beyond robotic insertion tasks due to a fundamental requirement of having to execute fine-granular movements within a constrained environment (sample vial). Motivated by how human chemists carry out this process of scraping powder from vials, our work proposes a model-free reinforcement learning method for learning a scraping policy, leading to a fully autonomous sample scraping procedure. We first create a scenario-specific simulation environment with a Panda Franka Emika robot using a laboratory scraper that is inserted into a simulated vial, to demonstrate how a scraping policy can be learned successfully in simulation. We then train and evaluate our method on a real robotic manipulator in laboratory settings, and show that our method can autonomously scrape powder across various setups.