Hyve™ – Your Experiment, Your Process, Automated
The Future of Laboratory Robotics has Arrived
Applied Scientific Technologies (AST) of Stokesley, North Yorkshire announce Hyve™, a new way of deploying automation in your lab whilst keeping the scientist at the centre of its activities. The evolution of Laboratory 4.0 has created huge potential for industrial and collaborative robots (Cobots). Hyve™, a Collaborative Autonomous Robot, is designed to discover advancements in formulation chemistry and biotechnology, specific for integration and automation in laboratory environments. Hyve™ is unique in the turnkey, laboratory automation marketplace.
Cobots are a hot topic in the industrial environment and more and more industries are adapting to this IR4 change. Collaborative robots are providing manufacturers with a paradigm shift in safe, versatile, easy-to-use automation that supports human endeavour. In order to stay competitive, companies must begin to integrate innovative robot systems to provide flexible production lines to fit the ever-changing customer needs and product requirements. What better way to do this than using a Cobot alongside humans.
An early adopter, one of the world’s leading beauty and cosmetics companies use Hyve™ for product stability testing, however Hyve™ was developed originally for pharmaceutical and biotech companies illustrating the are many markets this autonomous collaborative robot is suited to. Hyve™ can be a stand-alone system or operate together in a Beehive-like architecture to form a production line.
“Hyve fits into the lab environment easily and works well alongside our scientists who find the Hyve very easy to work with.”
Our early adopter stated that “Hyve fits into the lab environment easily and works well alongside our scientists who find the Hyve very easy to work with”.
“By introducing Hyve™ to the laboratory testing arena it has helped in stability studies and extracting analytics that were otherwise impossible or took 10 times longer,” said Garry Lofthouse, Director of AST. “Previously, data was available to the operations team after two to three years.
This is significantly reduced due to fully automated accelerated testing and in-line analysis. Results are now seen in two to three months! The impact of environmental conditions and accelerated testing scenarios on the product is crucial, ensuring quality manufactured goods are developed retaining the quality and shelf-life required by both manufacturer and the consumer” Lofthouse added.
Hyve™ is a unique design concept and is a user-friendly robot that can be configured for the cosmetics, pharmaceutical, healthcare, biotech and food and drinks market. It can be adapted and redeployed easily so as your requirements change, Hyve™ can change too! This is due to its modular construction, consisting of a base system with plug in modules/segments, each segment can be configured or re-configured with different lab equipment and processes, which means it is particularly favourable for those in an R&D environment where change in research demand is high.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Thing (IoT) technologies future proofs this system. Hyve™ is compatible with Over-the-Air updates, system diagnostics and performance dashboards. The use and automation of processes to capture data is deployed in the IoT cloud-based on-board software
Top picture of silver hexagonal robot with robot arm above test tubes in a factory with blue flooring.
Hyve™ allows AST to offer the first ‘off-the-shelf’ modular, collaborative robotic system, reducing production costs, improving reliability and ultimately increasing speed to market. Hyve™ has the same availability as an off-the-shelf platform and reflects identical scalability of a larger integrated platform with the same level of flexibility of a bespoke solution. It has been developed specifically to work alongside humans without the need of a cumbersome safety cage and the versatility of the robot has meant it can be configured easy for many different applications. The cobot at the centre of Hyve™ complies with all safety requirements for the collaboration of humans and robots as specified in ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066.
Some of the segments already developed which can be attached to Hyve™ include sample preparation for consumer products like haircare, inks, paints, catalysts, drugs and incorporating classic lab equipment such as balances, pumps, pH meters, Heaters/Chillers, digital pipettes, stirrers, homogenisers, dilution stations in preparation for analytics such as Turbidimeters, Spectrophotometers, HPLC, GC-MS and Rheometers to name but a few.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies future proofs the system to address changing market demands and expectations. The interface is similar to configuring a tablet for example an iPad or Android tablet, rather than needing a qualified software professional to change the code. The use of collaborative robotics makes the system more of a robotic scientist rather than a machine in a laboratory that needs operators with scientific esoteric knowledge to run.
Applied Scientific Technologies (AST) is an emerging company founded in 2017 Stokesley, North Yorkshire. It has founded by two directors from the sister company, Applied Integration UK Ltd which was founded over 15 years ago. AST was established to develop new applications for robotics platforms and they are innovative specialists in robotics, automated control systems and hardware integration into life and physical sciences, industrial, laboratory and medical applications, supporting their digitalization and automation journey.
Since the launch of Hyve™, the company has been overwhelmed with potential clients looking to use the collaborative robot as part of their automation strategy.
“In 2017, we did our research and set up AST to serve what we believe has huge potential for robotics,” said Garry Lofthouse.
Hyve™ is available to purchase now. For more information on the product please call our Applied Scientific Technologies team today on 01642 717550, or contact us.