That’s really interesting, this is partly why I was wondering about process modeling in another thread Process Analytics (Bottlenecks, Sample Flow) - #8 by SmoothG.
I guess it’s tough to estimate because startups and labs are going to pivot to different workflows but for a $5M+ automated lab we should have some quantitative models of production rate backing up our decisions.
On a side note someone told me they bought X brand of robot because they were most familiar with the interface. To me this seems like buying a specific car because you are familiar with the steering wheel! Very much understandable but indicates a larger problem. We need better data for comparing these essentially similar machines. Is it possible to have some universal metrics for comparing flow-through rate of a given process across different robots? I think so!