Facile Integration of Robots into Experimental Orchestration at Scientific User Facilities

Integration of robots into scientific user facilities, such as the National Synchrotron Light Source II, improves their efficiency and capacity. Many such facilities use the open- source Bluesky project for experimental control and orchestra- tion. However, there remains an open challenge in deploying robotic solutions at these facilities that are reconfigurable, extensible, and compatible with pre-existing software infras- tructure. Herein, we introduce a framework that uses the Robotic Operating System 2 (ROS2) and Bluesky to provide extensible robotic applications, while working under the opera- tional constraints of a large-scale user facility. We demonstrated this framework by integrating a robotic arm to pick and place a sample holder at a beamline, recording a 90% repeatability rate. This provides the groundwork for further new robotics applications at large-scale scientific user facilities that depend on Bluesky.