Understanding the Influence of Robot Motion on the Experimental Processes Present in Food Science Applications

Laboratory experiments in modern food labs are human-driven and tedious processes which can have limited throughput, reliability, repeatability or robustness. Through repeatable motions and precise control of process parameters, robotic automation can provide significant improvements to the existing experimental processes, and also improve manual assessment of the sensory data. By developing a robotic automation system which performs the make, measure, adjust and clean processes for a milk beverage made from water and powdered milk, we explore how variation in different process parameters impacts quality of the beverage in terms of the measured pH value. Using collected data we also identify optimal process parameters from robustness and time-cost standpoint. By comparing performance of the robotic system to a human we demonstrate varied performance in the pH adjustment process and 3x better precision in the pH probe cleaning. We identify that designed robotic system requires 45% more time to perform the experiment when compared to a human, yet provides significant advances in terms of repeatability and reproducibility. These findings demonstrate feasibility and benefits of the robotic automation in the food lab environments, thus paving the way for the broader implementation.