Biology Lab Automation
Edgenesis collaborated with Life Foundry to develop a foundational layer for their automation system.Through this partnership, Edgenesis effectively decoupled Life Foundry's engineers from the infrastructure, allowing them to concentrate on business logic.
Edgenesis helped Life Foundry:
- Efficiency Increase: A system that would have taken 2 years to develop was transformed into a project that needed just one Full-Time Worker (FTW) and 2 months to complete. This translates to a staggering 12x increase in efficiency.
- Cost Savings: By streamlining the development process and reducing the time required, Life Foundry saved an estimated $1.2 million in labor and overhead costs over the initial 2-year projection.
Challenges
Application and drivers are coupled. The entire development process was capped by it.
- Coupling: The device drivers and applications were tightly integrated, making it difficult to update one without affecting the other. This result in a slow developement process.
- Standardization: With over 100 different types of devices from various vendors and using different protocols, standardizing communication and control became a herculean task.
- Scalability: The existing monolithic architecture was not designed to scale, making it challenging to add new devices or expand the system to accommodate growing needs.
Edgenesis Solution
Agile Application Development
Clear separation between infrastructure and business logic. This decoupling allowed for more agile application development and easier maintenance.
Enhanced Scalability
Able to scale to millions of devices. The new architecture was designed with scalability in mind, making it easier to add new devices and expand to new locations.
Integrated Automatic CI/CD Process
Automated testing reduced the testing phase to just 2 days, speeding up the release cycle by 90% and reducing costs.
Centralized Management
Centralized device management eliminated the need for multiple platforms, reducing the systems needed for control and monitoring to just one.
Result
“Shifu helps us integrate all of our devices in a smart and efficient way. With Shifu, we can treat all of our devices as software objects and abstract away the physical devices. This makes it easier for us to manage and control our devices.”
Kanyon E.
Lead Robotics Engineer, Life-Foundry
