Developing new medical and pharmaceutical products requires testing a large number of samples in the laboratory, a time-consuming process where manual procedures still predominate. In the TraceBot project, an international team of six partners from five countries is working to make this process faster and more efficient through laboratory automation using robots that can think. BioLAGO is responsible for the entire communication, coordination and public relations of the project. TraceBot is funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 programme.
Responding to new health threats, producing new vaccines, personalised medicine, performing all kinds of testing procedures - all these processes require systematic review, understanding of the correct execution of steps and verified completion of the entire task. These requirements are summarised under the term traceability, known internationally as traceability.
The goal of the TraceBot project is to develop laboratory robots that fulfil the criterion of traceability and are thus suitable for use in laboratory environments as well as other fields of application with high safety and flexibility requirements. To do this, they must meet both certain application needs and applicable regulations that regulate working in sterile environments. Among other things, these regulations require that each step in test processes must be documented so that an audit trail is created and traceability is provided.
Until now, robots have not been able to fulfil these requirements. The TraceBot project addresses this challenge to find a generic, safe and efficient solution: Robots that can quickly adapt to new products and tasks, are safe and trouble-free in operation and meet the high safety standards of laboratory environments. To achieve this, TraceBot envisages, among other things, the application of AI and cognitive methods that enable robots to perform comprehensible assembly actions. Each assembly and process action of the robot is to be followed by a control action, creating a verifiable sensor/actor trace - by means of a digital semantic twin. This setting would enable the use of robots in regulated laboratory environments and other procedures that require traceability and verification, helping to automate procedures that previously had to be done manually. This will make autonomous laboratory systems viable from an economic, quality and regulatory perspective.
Companies of all sizes, from SMEs to internationally operating corporations, could benefit from TraceBot: An intelligent robotic solution that can be effortlessly integrated into existing laboratory facilities, bringing them one step closer to the automated laboratory of the future.
Find out more about TraceBot on the website.
