Question: Does anything bad ever happen to the robots?

Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 13 Mar 2014:

Hi ambert2003, great question. The robots do get put through their paces as we have lots of work and we are looking at making large volumes of cells and medicines, but we look after them by making sure they are regularly cleaned and have everything they need (e.g. growth medium to feed cells with). We also make sure they are serviced by engineers (a bit like a car having its MoT check-up) except the engineers have to come to us as robots don’t like being jiggled about!.
Sometimes things do go wrong, one of my robots has a very powerful robot arm that is as big as my leg and it did crash a flask into the side of the robot cabinet during one experiment 😳
This made a huge bang, the flask was smashed to pieces so my sample was lost and the robot arm was jammed into place 😕
I had to perform a recovery operation which means I take control of the robot computer and have to guide the robot back into its “home” position (a bit like re-starting a computer game when you go back to the start) except I’m trying to move a very powerful big robot arm around without crashinginto anything else! – I took it very slowly and one of my lab friends helps keep lookout in case I can’t see everything. It was all OK in the end and it wasn’t my fault that the robot crashed, but we were able to fix the problem so it didn’t happen again 😛