Designing an autonomous system for protein crystallography
What is it about?
Automation of the mounting of cryo-cooled crystals is now a feature of any beamline dedicated to Macromolecular Crystallography (MX). This paper describes a fully autonomous system that forms the core automation for the ESRF beamline MASSIF-1 - a beamline that performs experiments by itself.
Why is it important?
Sample changers have been used at beamlines for many years but the need for manual interventions to recover from small errors has made the possibility of fully autonomous data collection unworkable. This paper describes a robot that has been designed to work autonomously by being able to escape from most errors and continue without delays. It is unique as it is both a robotic sample changer and a high prescision goniometer in a single device allowing the system to control the entire experiment from sample selection to data collection. It is the core automation on the world's first completely autonomous beamline, MASSIF-1.