A robot platform can be used to prepare sample vessels for use in the field including vials and bottles. This may include adding a preservative such as methanol, sulphuric acid and nitric acid or in powder / pellet form such as acetic acid or sodium benzoate. The robot can accomodate a wide variety of vessel sizes from 3mL vials up to 500mL amber sample bottles. Connection with LIMS is available to ensure that each sample vessel can be recorded and tracked.
The robot can be used to perform serial dilution on vials and wellplates. Disposable tip pipettes ensure there is no cross contamination between samples
Liquid handling can be a major part of day to day activities for a laboratory. Robots can be set up to perform the highly repetitive task of distributing samples for tests in different parts of the laboratory. For a complete turnkey solution, a robot can select a sample bottle, uncap it, weigh the sample to determine if enough fluid is present, receive instructions from LIMS, then distribute the sample to different racks based on the required tests. In this case, the use of robots creates a walk away solution with significantly higher throughput. As well, it eliminates the exposure to repetitive strain injury as the lab technicians would normally be uncapping and capping several hundred bottles a day.