This paper presents a system integration approach for a 6-DoF (Degree of Freedom) collaborative robot to operate a pipette for liquid dispensing. Its technical development is three-fold. First, we designed an end-effector for holding and triggering manual pipettes. Second, we took advantage of direct teaching to specify global labware poses and planned robotic motion based on them. Third, we leveraged hand-mounted cameras and visual classifiers to predict and correct positioning errors, which allowed precisely attaching pipettes and tips without calibration. Through experiments and analysis, we confirmed that the developed system, especially the planning and visual recognition methods, could help secure high-precision and flexible liquid dispensing. The developed system is suitable for low-frequency, high-repetition biochemical liquid dispensing tasks. We expect it to promote the deployment of collaborative robots for laboratory automation and thus improve the experimental efficiency without significantly customizing a laboratory environment.Note to Practitioners—The proposed system helps to automate low-frequency, high-repetition biochemical experiments using a vertical articulated robot with uncalibrated hand-mounted cameras and TCP (Tool Center Point). It can be quickly deployed in tight lab spaces or beside existing automation instruments for experiments. Implementing the system does not require high-quality cameras or precise manufacturing. The system relies on software, particularly vision compensation, and the flexibility provided by unfixed racks to successfully perform pipetting tasks. We particularly recommend using collaborative robots to implement the proposed system. Collaborative robots typically meet safety requirements and do not need to be enclosed in a cage. This allows them to be deployed in the same workspace as human researchers, enabling efficient lab experiments. Human researchers can prepare tips and microwell plates and place them in front of the robot with a certain degree of freedom, which is less burdensome than traditional automatic devices that require precise placement of tips and plates in specified positions. Practitioners can view an example of the robot working with a plant phenotyping system for screening chemicals in the supplementary video.

This study proposed a method for the fine alignment of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp used in multiple microcontact printing. The procedure of alignment method was organized into three steps; (1) the fabrication of PDMS stamp with an alignment marker, (2) the position detection of PDMS stamp with a noncontact laser displacement sensor on an automated planar x-y axes stage, and (3) the position adjustment of PDMS stamp to target position with another automated planar x-y-θ axes stage. The procedure was able to perform without contact onto the surface of PDMS stamp just before the moment of contact printing. Therefore, the surface would be safe from molecular/bacterial contamination. This study implemented the procedure into a developed system for the alignment of PDMS stamp. After adjusting the position of PDMS stamps applied with fibronectin-binding-fluorescent dyes with three different colors, contact printing was performed. As a result, the error of position between two different patterns of fibronectin was within 33 μm. This method would be useful for generating a multi-type-cellular tissue in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Micro contact printing is a quite useful technique for patterning protein such as cellular adhesion molecular. Especially, the method is popular to fabricate substrates for cell patterning in tissue engineering. However, a manual printing is difficult, because the stamp made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is easily deformed, and a printed pattern is also crushed. This study focused on the stiffness of PDMS stamp and discussed a micro-contact-printing controlled stamping force for a higher quality of pattern than that of manual. Considering in availability in medical or biological laboratory, the measurement method of stamp stiffness was developed by using a general microscope. The proposed stamping method gave a high printing-quality with 2.5% error of stamping area. Stamping setup controlling stamping force was developed, and a protein was patterned on a cell-culture substrate by the setup. By using the protein-patterned substrate, two-cell-patterned co-culture was successfully performed.

Verification of the hardware/software functions of a 10-Gbit/s-class large-scale network systems-on-a-chip (NW SoC) requires the use of multiple field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. We propose two schemes for the efficient mapping of the design data of the NW SoC into FPGA devices. We implemented practical NW SoC design data for FPGA devices, and evaluated the effectiveness of the schemes. The results show that the proposed schemes can reduce the number of wires by 13% and improve the register access cycle time by 28%.

This paper presents a software-hardware co-operative protocol processor for a 10 gigabit Ethernet passive optical network (10G-EPON), designed with a software-hardware division technique that focuses on the throughput and timing-accuracy requirements. This protocol processor consists of frame-processing hardware to meet the timing requirements, an interface to absorb the speed difference between software and hardware, and software to implement additional protocols. This protocol processor enables network operators to install additional service protocols adaptively for their own services. The 10G-EPON system with this protocol processor properly worked in the experiment.

Non-contact stiffness sensor is often utilized especially for medical fields due to its advantage of avoiding damage to tissues and keeping sanitary. However, it is hard to measure the force accurately, because the fluid jet based force much depends upon the shape after deformation of object. This paper proposes an innovative approach where the external force is adaptively calibrated based on the deformation of object so that we can evaluate the internal stiffness parameters more accurately than that of conventional approaches. It is shown that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of force application with even 100% at an extreme case.

This paper proposes a mixed mode simulation using dynamic network separation and selective trace. Since the separation technique enables the analysis of each subcircuit independently, it is possible to skip solving the latent subcircuits according to selective trace, though it is based on the direct method. Selecting the time points in accordance with activity of each subcircuit is analogous to multirate numerical integration technique used in the waveform relaxation algorithm. As a result, the matured direct/relaxation-based mixed mode simulator, including a variety of skilful techniques, is realized.>