building a laboratory robot

I'm trying to develop an adaptable robot for use in our biological laboratory. We have access to robots for liquid handling and colony picking (basically touching pins to microbial colonies and moving them to arrays of well with growth medium). I'd like to cobble together something more affordable and accessible using open tools that we and others would be free to develop and modify as we see fit.

There are nuances to each application that I won't drone on about right now, but I want to get...

building a laboratory robot