Diagnostics Laboratory Automation - Archiving Vacuum Tubes Using a Low-Cost Gantry Robot

It has been a standard medical practice of diagnostic test laboratories as part of the legal process to archive every test sample for a specific period just in case the patients return for re-tests. Archiving tested samples involves identification, placing them in pallets and recording the position as part of the database to ease out the retrieval of the same for later purposes. The pallets will be preserved for any future reference. The automation built as part of the work involved the fabrication of a Gantry robot with the development of hardware and software systems for application and controls. The application work involved the detection of vacuum tubes, picking from source pallets and placing them in destination pallets after categorization concerning departments. The image processing algorithm involved training the model on annotated datasets, employing the YOLO algorithm and PyTorch. The designed Gantry robot can archive an average of 300 vacuum tubes per hour and provides a work volume of 600mm x 500mm x 130mm.