Pathways to Open-Source Hardware for Laboratory Automation

For the second time, we are planning to gather a group of scientists and engineers interested in using open-source technologies for automating scientific experiments in Seattle, WA! This workshop will be held April 13–15, 2025.

Organized by the University of Washington and collaborators:

• Nadya Peek, UW Machine Agency
• Lilo Pozzo, UW Chemical Engineering
• Blair Subbaraman, UW Machine Agency
• Gabrielle Benabdallah, UW Machine Agency
• Danli Luo, UW Machine Agency
• Wm Salt Hale, UW Machine Agency
• Keith A. Brown, Boston University
• Maria Politi, UBC Chemistry
• Tim Dobbs, BioMADE
• Sterling Baird, UofT Accelerate Consortium

Participants

• Aliénor Lahlou, Sony CSL Paris / ENS PSL
• BoB Lesuer, SUNY Brockport
• Clara Tamura, University of Washington
• Eleftheria Roumeli, UW Materials Science & Engineering
• Eric Klavins, University of Washington
• Fabrice Dessolis, Aix-Marseille University
• Gilad Kusne, NIST
• Hanson Chen, UW Chemical Engineering
• Jared Nakahara, University of Washington
• Jie Xu, Argonne National Laboratory
• Josh Smith, UW CSE & ECE
• Joshua Schrier, Fordham University
• Nikki Nemerson, Boston University
• Madeline Wolf, The Automated Lab
• Matt Reish, UBC Hein Lab
• Nada Naser, University of Washington
• Peter Beaucage, NIST
• Tyson Carr, University of Washington
• Vinh Nguyen, University of Washington
• Zach Wylie, University of Washington

Schedule

Sunday - 4/13

• 6-9p: Introductions and community social at the eScience Institute WRF Data Science Studio

Monday - 4/14

• 9-9:30a: Light breakfast and light conversations in Sieg 329
• 9:30-10:20a: Workshop kick-off (Nadya Peek and Lilo Pozzo) in Sieg 329
• 10:30a-12p: Hands-on activity in Sieg 118
• 12-1:30p: Cross-group conversation and lunch in Sieg 329
• 1:30-2:20p: Small-group discussions 1 (Tim Dobbs) in Sieg 420/429
• 2:30-4:20p: Hands-on activity in Sieg 118
• 4:30-5:30p: Small-group discussions 2 (Sterling Baird) in Sieg 420/429
• 6-8p: Day 1 wrap-up conversation and dinner at Big Time

Tuesday - 4/15

• 9-9:30a: Light breakfast and light conversations in Sieg 329
• 9:30-10:20a: Small-group discussions 3 (Maria Politi) in Sieg 329
• 10:30a-12p: Hands-on activity in Sieg 118
• 12-1:30p: Cross-group conversation and lunch in Sieg 429
• 1:30-2:20p: Small-group discussions 4 (Keith Brown) in Sieg 433
• 2:30-4:20p: Final hackathon session in Sieg 118
• 4:30-5:30p: Final discussion and report back in Sieg 433
• 6-8p: Workshop wrap-up conversation and dinner at Big Time

Discussion Topics

Discussion Theme 1: Establishing Common Form Factors for Experiments (Tim Dobbs)

The tension between standardization and novelty in lab automation is especially present in the design of hardware apparatus, which is more resource-intensive than software. One way to address this issue is to identify common experimental approaches that could be supported by similar hardware form factors. Such a framework would provide guidance for practitioners to develop interoperable parts. This discussion will focus on the effectiveness of such a strategy to empower open-science ecosystems, as well as identifying common experimental approaches and their corresponding form factors.

Discussion Theme 2: Community Organization and Education (Sterling Baird)

What structures and practices best support the open-source lab automation community? We’ll dive into models for sustainable collaboration, knowledge sharing, and governance, with a focus on improving how we organize, onboard, and support contributors across diverse projects and institutions. We’ll explore how education (both formal and informal) can help grow the community’s technical capacity and foster a culture of shared learning.

Discussion Theme 3: Documentation of Open-Source Automation (Maria Politi)

Good documentation is essential for reproducibility, collaboration, and sustainability in open-source lab automation—but it’s often one of the hardest challenges. This session will explore why documentation is so critical, what makes it difficult in open science contexts (e.g., rapidly changing hardware/software, diverse contributors), and how we might develop practices and tools to support better, more accessible documentation.

Discussion Theme 4: Lab Orchestration: Scaling from One Robot to Many (Keith Brown)

Autonomous workflows often feature a single system that sequentially performs acts on a single sample at a time. Such processes are conceptually easy to schedule. In contrast, fully automated work cells can feature multiple samples moving between multiple instruments. In this circumstance, managing sample provenance and prioritizing experiments becomes challenging. This discussion will focus on the challenges inherent to such orchestration and open-source solutions to these challenges.

Resources

Code, documentation, and other resources used in the April 2025 workshop can be found in this GitHub repository. Other information such as a link to the Google drive should have been sent to participants in emails from Wm Salt Hale.

Travel Policies

Given that sponsored travel is federally funded, there are a number of guidelines which need to be followed. For instance, if you are considering extending your trip outside of the workshop dates, you must provide an airfare comparison and abide by Fly America Act mandates. Additional travel policy details can be found here.

A group of scientists and engineers interested in using open-source technologies for automating scientific experiments gathered, built, and shared their approaches in Seattle, WA, April 25–27, 2024.

Organized by Machine Agency and the Pozzo Research Group

• Nadya Peek, UW Machine Agency
• Lilo Pozzo, UW Chemical Engineering
• Blair Subbaraman, UW Machine Agency
• Danli Luo, UW Machine Agency
• Brenden Pelkie, UW Chemical Engineering
• Maria Politi, UW Chemical Engineering
• Taylor Hilton, UW Materials Science
• Sam Ferguson, UW Machine Agency
• Wm Salt Hale, UW Machine Agency

Participants

• Sterling Baird, Acceleration Consortium
• Roxanne Balanay, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Peter Beaucage, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Claire Benstead, University of Washington
• Joe Brown, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Keith A. Brown, Boston University
• Yang Cao, University of Toronto
• Gastón Corthey, Universidad Nacional de San Martin
• Tim Dobbs, BioMADE
• Aliénor Lahlou, Sony CSL Paris
• Russell A. Laudone, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Ethan Li, Stanford University
• Benji Maruyama, AFRL
• Nicolás A. Méndez, CONICET
• Matthew Nakamura, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Vinh Nguyen, University of Washington
• Andrew Quitmeyer, Digital Naturalism Laboratories
• Jake Read, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
• C. W. Schlenker, University of Washington
• Aleks Siemenn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Shijing Sun, University of Washington

Schedule

Thursday

6-9p: Introductions and community happy hour at the eScience Institute WRF Data Science Studio

Friday

8:30-9:30a: Arrive at Sieg Building, breakfast

9:30a-6p: Workshop: Working with and building open source hardware for laboratory automation.

Discussion Theme 1: Current challenges of lab automation and open hardware

What are the challenges people are facing when trying to use or develop laboratory automation hardware? There are many different tools already available for laboratory automation, some of which are open source: e.g., OpenTrons, OpenFlexureMicroscope, Mothbox, but integrating them into experimental workflows or developing new tools that are compatible with them remains challenging.

Discussion Theme 2: Community Building, Goal Alignment, Calibration, and Shared Standards

Shared infrastructure implies that we could run the same experiments on each other’s hardware, perhaps using common control algorithms. However, for that to be possible, we need to calibrate and optimize the tools such that they are actually interchangeable, flexible, robust and generalizable. Is this currently already happening? Could it happen? How could we improve data exchange, sharing methods, and learning best practices from the community?

6:30-9:00p: Dinner at Big Time

Saturday

8:30-9:30a: Arrive at Sieg Building, breakfast

9:30a-6p: Workshop: Creating custom science workflows using open-source science hardware/software.

Discussion Theme 3: Where do we go from here?

There are many different (small) communities working on open-source hardware for laboratory automation. Working together could be synergistic, but organizing a larger community also has overhead. What do we think are (realistic) plans for this community moving forward?

6:30-9:00p: Dinner at Big Time

Resources

Code, documentation, and other resources used in the April 2024 workshop can be found in this GitHub repository. Other information such as a link to the Google drive should have been sent to participants in emails from Wm Salt Hale.

Travel Policies

Given that sponsored travel is federally funded, there are a number of guidelines which need to be followed. For instance, if you are considering extending your trip outside of the workshop dates, you must provide an airfare comparison and abide by Fly America Act mandates. Additional travel policy details can be found here.