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- Cobot Boosts Productivity By 20% For Neurological Research | Cobot Spotlight
Cobot Boosts Productivity By 20% For Neurological Research | Cobot Spotlight
Imagine boosting the quality and quantity of work conducted by top-notch scientists working on improving treatment for conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. That’s precisely what ABB did for the Texas Children’s Hospital!
Catherine Bernier
February 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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What do fruit flies, cobots, and neurological diseases share in common today?
The Texas Children’s Hospital.
The Drosophila melanogaster, otherwise known as the fruit fly, is critical for researching prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and similar neurological diseases.
However, we can’t just ask these flies nicely to participate in the research process.
For quality results, they must be handled in a particular way. In fact, researchers even needed to immobilize them with anesthetics. However, the clever introduction of the ABB cobot eliminated this tedious task, boosted output, and improved the accuracy of the results!
The researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital are using the ABB Dual-arm YuMI cobot, which has boosted productivity by 20% and reduced the time it takes to get the research results.
Cobot Brand: ABB | Customer: Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital | Application: Laboratory handling |
|---|---|---|
The Key Problem | How the Cobot Was Implemented | The Results |
The tedious task of manually handling fruit flies and the anesthetization process reduces the research accuracy. | The dual-arm ABB YuMI cobot performs the same actions as humans, tapping and transferring fruit flies between vials. | 20% productivity boost and a medical breakthrough achievement that removes the need for anesthetization for flies. |
The Fruit Fly Challenge: Eliminating The Anesthetization
One of the challenges of working with fruit flies is feeding them. Of course, they have to eat too.
Researchers usually transfer fruit flies to vials with fresh food every 30 days. You have about 20,000 vials in a lab, so “flipping flies” is very time-consuming and contributes nothing to the research process.
Image of the ABB YuMI cobot transferring the flies in the Texas Children’s Hospital. Image source.
Not to mention that scientists waste their time and energy on something rather pointless. It has to be done, but no scientist is eagerly waiting to flip flies.
Until now, the fly transfer required sedation, using carbon dioxide gas to immobilize them so they weren’t exposed to the outside of the vials during the transfer.
However, this may affect the accuracy of the analysis.
ABB Robotics engineers worked with the researchers at Duncan NRI to design a cobot-operated fly transfer station that eliminated this issue. This led to a significant medical breakthrough: No need for anesthetization means more productivity and accuracy.
Why The ABB YuMI Cobot
The dual-arm ABB YuMI cobot is a platform that can handle all of the necessary steps, just like a human.
The cobot can hold the vial with one arm while performing other steps with the other arm. This makes the automation process straightforward and mainly relies upon the cobot for automation.
The dual-arm YuMI cobot performs 10 pre-programmed steps, including:
Picking up the vial
Opening the protective plug
Placing the vial over the one with the fresh food
Tapping the vial to transfer the flies
Capping
Labeling
Scanning the vial for tracking the strain and genotype
And stacking it in the cardboard rack.
Manual tasks are a bottleneck in research. Scientists want to put their effort where it matters most—conducting research, not standing over vials for hours doing menial labor. Every hour wasted in a scientist’s life is an hour less before new treatments are discovered and verified.
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The Results
The implementation of the ABB’s cobot allowed researchers to save 20% of their time to focus on critical tasks of studying diseases.
By eliminating the anesthetization, they also helped improve the accuracy of the results. Since the fly behavior isn’t affected anymore, they’ll behave completely according to their nature, improving the study results.
In addition, the cobot system was designed to read the barcodes and print labels. So, the researchers can automate the tracking of the Drosophila strains without a manual effort.
Learn more about how ABB’s cobot improved Duncan NRI research here:
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Enjoy your week!
The Cobot Success Stories Team