Connecting to Lab Resources

To get the most out of the Artificial Platform, Artificial needs to be connected to your lab’s resources such as workcells, instruments, LIMS, or other hardware or software. Through these connections, Artificial can control and monitor your lab’s resources, enabling you to run workflows and experiments on your lab equipment. Artificial automatically manages these connections so that you don’t have to do the hard work of writing a distributed scheduling and execution system and can focus on doing science.

Note

We use the word “resource” to refer to any piece of lab equipment or software that Artificial can connect to. This includes workcells, instruments, LIMS, or other hardware or software.

The code that manages these connections is called an Adapter. An Adapter is a Python program that connects to one or more lab resources and translates Actions called from an Artificial Job into commands that the resources can understand. The Adapter also translates the responses from the resources back into a format that Artificial can understand and logs the responses to the Job Data Record.

Using our SDK, you can write your own custom Adapters to connect to your lab’s resources. The SDK provides a set of base classes and utilities that allow you to do everything from update the digital twin, to access adapter, lab, or job config, to manage pausing and resuming long-running Actions.

Artificial provides pre-built Resource Libraries for a wide variety of common lab resources such as workcell schedulers, liquid handlers, analytical instruments, and LIMSs. You can install these pre-built Resource Libraries into your Adapter to quickly connect to your lab equipment. These Resource Libraries are built on top of the SDK and provide a set of Actions that you can use in your workflows to control your lab equipment, and also provide useful functionality such as automatically syncing resource state to your digital twin (so that, for example, your digital twin lights up red when your robot drops a sample and can show plates moving around the deck of your liquid handler).

Note

For a full list of our pre-built Resource Libraries, see Supported Equipment. Follow the resource-specific guide to install the Resource Library and set up your Adapter to connect to your lab equipment.

If you don’t see your lab equipment in the list, we’re happy to work with you to get it added. Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email support@artificial.com for more details.

You can also write your own fully custom drivers to connect to resources for which we haven’t yet made pre-built Resource Libraries. We have a driver development framework available to help with this, or you’re welcome to go the fully custom route if you prefer.