A review on the advances in non-application specific laboratory automation

Automation is dominating industries with high-throughput processes. Recently automation began gradually to make its way into laboratories in the biochemical, biotechnological and pharmaceutical sectors. For laboratory employees and researchers, it is therefore difficult to keep an overview of the rapid progress of new technologies in this field. Often, they are only aware of the application specific solutions required in their environment. The aim of this work is to review advances of non-application specific laboratory automation in biochemical, analytical and biotechnological laboratories. An insight into the essential hardware and software infrastructure required for non-application specific laboratory automation is provided, and existing state-of-the-art hardware and software technologies are elaborated. Emphasis is placed on the plug-and-play functionality of the different technologies and missing links comprising internal mechanical and control interfaces. Existing approaches to holistic workflow automation are considered according to their hardware- and software implementation. To sum up, this review investigates the state of the art comprising software and hardware technologies for use in holistic workflow automation. We identify criteria that pave the way for future developments and areas with optimization potential to enable plug-and-play functionality and thus cost-effective and rapid integration benefiting end users.