Developing a "self-driving" (i.e., fully autonomous) scientific laboratory is an ambitious task. Certain tasks are much harder to automate, such as moving a sample from one piece of equipment to another. It may make sense to leave certain steps to a person while working towards a fully self-driving lab; however, a smooth pass off between software and the human can be difficult to implement. Here, we show an example of using the Prefect workflow orchestration platform (prefect.io/) to run a human-in-the-loop sample transfer workflow. In this example, the Python code pauses it's execution and sends a slack message to a user. The user opens up the message and reads a prompt such as "please move sample 1 from location A to location B". After carrying out the task, the user can then click a link to a Prefect cloud UI to report back the completion of the task, along with any other required information. This input goes directly to the Python code, which then automatically continues the rest of the workflow. Better yet, when the experimental step has been successfully automated later on, it's as simple as swapping out the human-in-the-loop function with the new API for carrying out that task.
The Python script shown in the video can be found at github.com/AccelerationConsor....
In case of version changes, a persistent link is also available at github.com/AccelerationConsor....