Future of the Engineering and Science of Automation in Bakery Square

Carnegie Mellon is prototyping the future of autonomous laboratories, sometimes known as “self-driving laboratories,” cloud labs, or automated laboratories. In this space, researchers control and access instruments remotely to perform research in chemistry, materials science, mesoscale energy synthesis, biology, biomedical engineering, tissue culture and more.

Located in Bakery Square, the prototype facility has an extensive collection of off-the-shelf laboratory instruments and student and CMU-spinout laboratory instruments. The facility extends the research mission of CMU’s students and collaborators by giving them the scale and access to important and cutting edge research problems.

For example, one of the new instruments addresses a critical problem in growing cells in the lab at scale for very heterogenous types of cells, all of which grow at different rates and require different and sometimes very delicate treatment, in a table-top form factor that is safe and easy to clean.

The lab will allow scientists and engineers to do more creative analysis and strategic thinking by automating and optimizing complex workflows that are fully traceable and reproducible.

Instrumentation 
General laboratory automation (liquid handling robotics), chemistry analytical instrumentation (high performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometers, structural characterization (x-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, biological instrumentation (flow cytometers, high-throughput sequencing)