Control system for the 2nd generation Berkeley automounters (BAM2) at GM/CA-CAT macromolecular crystallography beamlines
Section snippets
BAM2 advantage
A good overview on robotic sample handling for macromolecular crystallography is available at the SSRL/SMB website [1]. Robotic systems used at the X-ray beamlines are compared in Table 1.
BAM2 automounter design solutions offer a few advantages over the previous BAM1 model. A combination of a force sensor at the gripper and servo-motor driven stages enables automatic alignment of the gripper to the pucks in the Dewar as well as to the goniometer. Sample mount position at the goniometer can be
Beamline control system integration
The robot controller uses the Adept V+ real-time, multi-tasking operating system. A Commander interface was written in Java to communicate to the Adept controller over Modbus TCP. This program is used to generate sequences of robot actions. In order to integrate the Commander with the EPICS system used to control the GM/CA-CAT beamlines, the interface has been expanded to include monitoring EPICS process variables over Java channel access (JCA) that link it to a higher level GM/CA-CAT EPICS
Conclusion
A new second-generation Berkeley automounter has been installed at the 23BM-B experimental station (Fig. 4). Initial integration of the automounter control program with beamline control software is done by virtue of four EPICS PVs bridging the automounter server and the beamline server. The work in progress is to merge the CAM-EPICS-commander and the GM/CA-CAT EPICS robot server to provide an integrated system with a streamlined interface to the experimentalist. Our commissioning plans include
Acknowledgements
GM/CA-CAT is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (Y1-GM-1104) and the National Cancer Institute (Y1-CO-1020) of the US National Institutes of Health.
References (6)
- Robotic sample handling,...
- L.C. Yarris, Berkeley Lab Gets NIH Grant for second generation of automounter robots,...
- Adept Python linear modules,...
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