ABB Robotics is collaborating with precision instruments specialist Mettler Toledo to integrate ABB industrial robots with Mettler Toledo’s LabX lab instrument management software.

The combined solution will improve automated laboratory workflows across a range of industries, making research, testing, and quality control more flexible, while accelerating time-to-market and addressing critical labor shortages.

Laboratory automation, working alongside lab technicians, can perform an increasingly sophisticated range of tasks faster, more consistently and with fewer errors than human workers. Yet, the uptake of automation in laboratories is challenged by a gap in the skills needed to handle automation technology and the complexity in setting up highly sensitive workflows.   

With the collaboration, Mettler Toledo’s LabX software aim to integrate seamlessly into ABB’s OmniCore robot controllers, enabling LabX to orchestrate robotic lab workflows.

By combining the flexibility, ease-of-use and precision of ABB robots with the secure data capture, method control and instrument management of LabX, customers can increase lab productivity, reduce system complexity, fulfill data quality, and safety and regulatory requirements.

This can also relieve scientists and lab technicians of mundane, repetitive tasks; eliminating common errors; and optimizing productivity – providing lab professionals additional time to pursue higher-value activities, such as data analytics. 

The collaboration is part of ABB’s ongoing strategy to bring the benefits of automation to new segments worldwide and complements the work at the Life Sciences and Healthcare lab at the Texas Medical Center in Houston as well as the newly inaugurated Open Innovation Lab for Life Science and Healthcare in Zhangjiang Robot Valley, Shanghai.