Researchers say team of robots could eventually conduct 3,000 COVID-19 tests per day

A team of robots is helping researchers expedite the process of analyzing COVID-19 samples. The bots, developed by researchers at the UC Berkeley and UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), are being used in a pop-up lab to automate nearly the entire testing process. As noted in a report from the Daily Californian, while one bot takes patient samples from inside to the lab and transfers them to plates with wells another bot conduts what's known as a quantitative polymerase chain reaction, or qPCR, test. According to a report from Forbes, researchers in charge of the team of robots, which have already begun testing samples, say that they're conducting tests on about 200 samples per day. Once the system is scaled up, they hope to reach 1,000 samples per day with a max capacity up to 3,000 tests per day if necessary.