The LARAsuite is a freely and openly available collection of applications, libraries, databases and tools to plan, manage, create, monitor and evaluate (automated) processes in the laboratory. It has been developed by Mark Dörr and Stefan Maak from the LARA group at the University of Greifswald.
The vision is to cover all steps of laboratory work in a uniform framework with standardized communication protocols and data formats (like SiLA2, AnIML).
People who have a robotic arm with several devices they can access via SiLA (or at least python) and look for a framework do describe, orchestrate and schedule workflows on these devices. Some programming skills are necessary.
LARA tries to cover all aspects of a common laboratory workflow, starting from the planning of the experiments until the final presentation of the results.
The LARAsuite is modular and consists of different components that can be used independently or together to create a complete laboratory automation solution.
{ width="100%" } Architecture of LARASuiteThe most important components are the following:
The PythonLab package is a framework to define laboratory processes in python syntax. It converts the process definitions into workflow graphs that can be used by the orchestrator and scheduler.
The orchestrator is the component that executes the workflow graphs created by PythonLab. It manages the execution of the processes, allocates resources, and communicates with the devices through the wrappers.
The scheduler is responsible for optimizing the execution of the workflows. It takes into account the availability of resources, the dependencies between tasks, and the overall goals of the laboratory automation.
The platform status database keeps track of the status of all devices, labware, and substances in the laboratory. It provides real-time information to the orchestrator and scheduler. It also provides a UI to set the initial status of the lab.
This documentation has been written with the help of AI.