Prepper, PhD: DNA purification robotics system

This article describes the motivation and engineering trade-offs in the development process of a robot to greatly speed the handling of biological samples. The robot is called Prepper, PhD, (see H.R. Gamer et al., Scientific Computing and Automation, vol.9, no.4, p.61-8, 1993) named after the biological slang term-pop the process to extract and purify DNA from cells. The development of the Prepper, PhD, system started in 1991 with the construction of an alpha prototype that was merely a proof-of-principle. Since then, the author has advanced the system into a beta test unit that is being operated in the field. Soon, a full blown commercial unit will be introduced. The software is fault tolerant and capable of completely automatic operations as well as manual operations. The principle goal of the design is to perform biological manipulations rather than advance the state of the art of robotics. A study of the biological protocols involved was made prior to constructing any hardware. They were redesigned to integrate well on a robot and were simplified without any performance degradation. Simply integrating commercial robotics components would lead to an unacceptably expensive system. By limiting the motion of each component to only one direction, mechanical and control complexity was greatly reduced, yielding acceptable costs.<>