Mobile robotic transportation in laboratory automation: Multi-robot control, robot-door integration and robot-human interaction

A new system named Laboratory Mobile Robot Transportation System (LMRTS) is proposed for the dynamic & complex mobile robotic transportation in life science laboratories. In this paper, three collaborative strategies of the LMRTS system are presented, including the multiple mobile robot controlling, the robot-door automated integration and the robot-human interaction. To control the multiple mobile robots for the transportation, a four-level Client-Server controlling architecture (PMS-RRC-RBC-RAC) is proposed and a XML-based automated controlling workflow is designed. To organize the dynamic robotic transportation process and to include the robot-door interaction, a map theory based organizing strategy is proposed and a robot-door protecting algorithm is adopted in the organized plan. To realize the robot-human interaction, two interfaces are developed in the LPMS system to provide the initial human operations. To demonstrate the working process of the upper three aspects, a real experimental log file is given and explained.