This repository contains a distributed lab automation system built as part of Jace's final year project at Imperial College London. While it's primary use case is for research within the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology, it also aims to be a customisable and extensible framework for others to adapt and develop automation within their own labs for a wide variety of use cases, even beyond the realms of biology and research. This democratises lab automation, allowing anyone to build an interconnected lab of the future based on a plug-and-play approach.
This universal lab automation system, named ULAS, is primarily meant as a low-cost and flexible alternative for small research labs in academia to empower their researchers through standardising and automating tasks that are often manual, repetitive and error-prone, with the ultimate goal of improving the reproducibility and efficiency of research. It also aims to tighten the closed-loop between experimental design, execution and results (in synthetic biology this is known as the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle).
ULAS allows one to integrate all kinds of lab instruments and software tools into a unified platform that forms the backbone and "building blocks" that enable one to compose automated workflows and experimental protocols that span across these various integrations. These include laboratory information management systems, liquid handling robots, plate readers, etc.
The system is built as a set of microservices that work in tandem by enabling these integrations to "communicate" with one another and facilitate the flow of data between them. To find out more about how the overall system works, check out the documentation on Architecture.
While this project is far from complete or production-ready, it demonstrates the proof of concept and lays the groundwork towards building a robust and universal platform for developing lab automation at scale.
The following is the list of services that make up the core of ULAS:
service.control-towerservice.data-gatewayservice.ot-builderservice.chibio-relayservice.tecan-spark-relay
Documentation on their purposes, how they work, as well as running and developing them individually can be found in each service's README. It is recommended to go through all of them before jumping into the Getting Started section on how to use ULAS.
Auxiliary services include (for their configuration, see docker-compose.yaml):
db.redispubsub.redisexternal.chibio-server
New integrations and features are very much welcome to further expand the capabilities and overall usefulness of the project. To extend or customise ULAS, check out the documentation on Development.
I would like to thank the following people from the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology for their support and advice throughout the project:
- Dr. Zoltan Tuza (@zoltuz)
- Dr. Guy-Bart Stan
- Alice Boo
- Eszter Csibra
- Andreas Hadjimitsis