THE CLAW

We’ve made a useful auxilliary gripper for use in Opentrons OT2 robots

Opentrons robots are really useful to automate pipetting tasks. The robot has a deck which you fill with the bits and pieces you need for the experiment, then the robot squirts liquids around for you. However, sometimes it would be useful to move things around in the robot, for example to put a lid on a plate, or stack plates up.

Rob has come up with a useful gadget to move well plates around in the robot for us. It is made from 3D printed parts and inexpensive electronics, only costing around £100. “The claw” is able to pick up well plates and move them over other components in the opentrons OT2. His design for this has been put up on ChemRXiv and we’d be very happy to help other people make their own. “The Claw” can expand automated workflows without budget being a major barrier to users.

Read about it here:

https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-n95kk

The claw is Rob’s baby and took a lot of tweaking to work, particularly on integration with the Opentrons software. His design also needed careful optimisation to avoid dropping plates mid-motion like a fair-ground claw machine. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were shed.