OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING APPLIED TO LABORATORY AUTOMATION .3. THE STANDARD ROBOT INTERFACE PROTOCOL FOR THE ANALYTICAL DIRECTOR

A structured robot interface protocol has been developed for the Analy tical Director. The fundamental automation capability of a robotics la boratory is defined by a standard set of intrinsic functions and progr ammable control commands at a low level. Analytical procedures are rep resented and saved in chemistry notation format using a set of standar d syntax and semantic rules. With the robot interface protocol, analyt ical procedures in chemistry notation format can be translated by the Analytical Director to low level robot commands and executed by differ ent robot laboratories. The object-oriented modeling of an analytical laboratory and the four-layer structured robot interface protocol are discussed in this paper, The robot execution of an analytical method i s also presented and compared with human expert analyses.