Robotizing the Sterility Testing Process: Scientific Challenges for Bringing Agile Robots into the Laboratory

This article provides a detailed description of the membrane-based sterility testing process, the use case selected in the Horizon Europe project TraceBot for demonstrating the benefit of agile robotics in a laboratory setting and its interest for the pharmaceutical industry. Based on videos of human operators performing manually the sterility testing process, we detail its different steps, starting from a human perspective, with a more robotic approach in mind, and highlight the major atomic functionalities a robot should have for executing the process at hand. Together with the analysis of the process flow of actions, we also list all elements/objects involved, and analyse the technical and scientific challenges in this process and its application environment as well as in general pharmaceutical processes. Finally, with the objective to engage the community in collaborating and taking advantage of our use case study, the complete process flow description is made available on a website, together with associated data like the object’s meshes and a generic robotic setting in ROS environment.