As the rise of the robots is upon us, we see these intelligent machines appear all over the place. In Japan, robots will greet you at a hotel. In the U.S. you may find one patrolling a parking lot. And now, there are even bots that have been trained to help it in the lab so that scientists have more time to do more important things.
One such machine that has recently been developed and put to work is called the OT-One. This desktop robot has been built using 3D printer components and is used for biotech research. It can carry out boring, meticulous lab work such as dropping liquid from one test tube to another.
Although it’s not the first of its kind in existence, the OT-One is the first of its kind to be so competitively priced. For just $3,000 you can own one of these, opposed to the $100,000+ price tag you would expect to see for this type of machine. So far, 150 of these units have been sold to institutions including the Harvard, Stanford, the Mayo Clinic, and various startups. But, since Opentrons (the company behind the OT-One) received $2 million in venture funding from Khosla Ventures and others earlier this year, monthly sales have doubled.
OT-One has a motorized arm that will move however you tell it to buy a prescribed recipe or protocol that is downloaded beforehand from the Opentrons library. There is also an API that hooks up other equipment such as microscopes and robotic magnetic platforms. The OT-One is an open source system so anyone can adapt or build on it as they see fit. One company, called Helix Works, uses the machine to store data as DNA. This is just the beginning for biotech systems and it won’t be long before the OT-One is rolled out even more extensively.
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