Automation: robots in the vivarium

TECHNOLOGY FEATURE Automation: robots in the vivarium Arlene Weintraub PhonlamaiPhoto/Getty © 2017 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. Automation technologies are improving efficiency in the vivarium and helping institutions keep up with the growing number of mutant rodents in their colonies. Robotic automation is changing how institutions manage their rodent colonies. New genetic engineering techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9, now allow scientists to generate mutant rodents in a fraction of the time previously required, helping to drive forward large-scale projects like the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP) that seeks to understand the functional role of every mouse gene, including many with human homologs. As the number of genetically altered mice—and rats—maintained at research institutions continues to grow1, the burden and expense of caring for these animals have some institutions turning to automation of routine tasks in the vivarium. Streamlining the nitty-gritty At the Center for Comparative Medicine and Surgery at the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York, a yellow robotic arm that looks like it came straight out of a car factory picks up four dirty rodent cages, dumps the bedding out of them, and with a swish, places them against Arlene Weintraub is a science writer and journalist. Correspondence should be addressed to A.W. (arlene. ). LabAnimal four automatic scrapers that remove the remaining grime. In the room next door, another robot picks up the cages and places them on a conveyor belt, which takes them into an automatic tunnel washer. Within an hour, 240 cages are cleaned. Giving robots more of the rote responsibilities typically handled by people promises to save time and money—and to free up workers to focus on tasks more closely related to furthering research. That said, installing robotic cage washers requires significant planning, not to mention cooperation between lab managers, workers and sometimes even labor leaders. Many moving parts One day over the summer, a problem cropped up at Mt. Sinai: The grid that funnels dirty bedding to a vacuum system linked to the facility’s dumpsters was getting clogged with nesting material. Sending the dirty bedding directly into the dumpsters is saving Mount Sinai $8,000–12,000 a year worth of garbage bags, says Gorky Estrella, Assistant Operations Manager, and Kaware Richardson, Assistant Director of Operations. They had a relatively quick fix to this problem: having staff remove the nesting material before placing dirty cages into the automated system. To gain maximum efficiency for the waste removal process, Estrella also recommends having an additional backup dumpster ready on hand. “We have a backup that we keep in stock so that when the waste removal company comes to remove our full dumpster, they can just swap it out with our backup and it doesn’t disrupt our automated system.” On the opposite end of the system, where clean cages are prepared, Estrella and Richardson ran into another problem; the automatic bedding dispenser would run low and cause the system to stall. Because the automatic bedding dispenser and robotic arm were made by different companies, the two components weren’t communicating with each other. This was not a problem Estrella had anticipated when his team included the robotic system into the vivarium, which was built in 2012. “Every half hour or so the bedding dispenser would empty and the whole system would shut down.” To solve this problem, according to Richardson, “the best practice is to have one system made by the same company so you don’t have integration problems.” Robotic cage washers such as the system used at Mount Sinai have been available for the last 15 years, but challenges in installing and maintaining the systems have slowed down their adoption; not to mention the significant upfront price-tags. Robots such as Mount Sinai’s, which were provided by Tecniplast, cost about $600,000 a piece, Estrella says. But fully automated washing systems, which include tunnel washers and waste disposal and bedding dispensing systems, can cost as much as $1.5 million, estimates Brian Anderson, Business Development Director, Life Sciences at Getinge, another major provider of robotic Volume 46, No. 1 | JANUARY 2017 13 cage washers. Most lab managers agree, however, that replacing manual washing with robots offers significant benefits, not the least of which is that it cuts down on repetitive motion injuries and a llergy-related illnesses frequently suffered by workers dur ing handwashing processes. Robotic cage washing Likewise, workers systems have upfront free from cage washprice tags, but ing can perform can provide longother duties to term savings and enhance the overall improvements, says welfare of animals Brian Anderson. at a facility. This improves not only animal wellbeing, but also the overall quality and reproducibility of the science for which they are used. Only recently has the industry started to figure out best practices for operating the robots as efficiently as possible—advances that are now making it possible for research facilities to reap significant returns on their investments. “The biggest benefit of automation is improving quality and precision,” says John Hasenau, principal consultant at Laboratory Animal Consultants in Reno, NV. “Robotics for cage washing has seen a big push in the last five years in terms of innovation.” Once vivarium staff members grow comfortable with robotic cage washing systems, institutions can add complementary technologies to boost efficiency even more. At Harvard University’s Cambridge, MA, campus, for example, they’ve added RFID tags to each cage and antennas in the ceilings to read those tags. That allows them to count cages automatically and keep track of which room each cage is in, without staff having to scan the tags using handheld devices. “We now have a digital record of every cage, and we’ve reduced the administrative time it takes to process a monthly inventory of all of our cages from 10 hours to 30 minutes,” says Steven Niemi, director of the Office of Animal Resources at Harvard. Niemi also highlights how more automation can help staff and investigators work together better. “In addition, the digital cage ID platform now allows us to customize cage 14 Volume 46, No. 1 | JANUARY 2017 Built-in computer vision detects cage's orientation and rotates the robotic arm. Kim Caesar/Springer Nature © 2017 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. TECHNOLOGY FEATURE Gantry-style robotic systems provide on-the-fly adjustments to minimize disruptions during cage processing. c omponents easily if an investigator wants a different bedding, food, or nesting material.” The potential for such efficiency gains will continue to drive the adoption of robotics, predicts Brian Wu, an engineer at Mount Sinai who helps with the upkeep of its robotic cage washers. Twist (...truncated)