Hudson Robotics Brand Guidelines: A 1983 Springfield, New Jersey Lab Robot Maker & Its Merger

Scheduling software, robot arms and a Springfield base.

Hudson Robotics was founded in 1983 and is based in Springfield, New Jersey, the company says on its website; the founding year was repeated by Private Equity International in July 2022. A June 2013 company release named Philip Farrelly as its founder and president.

The same release gives the company’s own account of its beginnings. Hudson Robotics, it says, “started as an integrator,” providing one of the earliest PC-based scheduling software solutions for laboratory instruments, and began distributing automation systems in 1985, when it says it became the first distributor of CRS robotic arms in the US market. From there it says it grew organically over thirty years, building a portfolio of instruments, software and technology. “I don’t know of another company our size with the amount of products, solutions and capabilities that we can offer,” Farrelly said in the release.

For part of its history the company traded under another name. In May 2008 SelectScience reported on its products under the name Hudson Control Group, and by 2013 its releases were again issued as Hudson Robotics, Inc.

In June 2013 the company reorganised into three divisions — Hudson Custom Solutions, Hudson Life Science and Hudson Screening — effective on 1 June. Farrelly said in the release that the company was “changing our business model after 30 years” and wanted partnerships with companies “large and small, foreign and domestic.”

Pipettors, plate robots and the software between them.

Hudson Robotics’ products fall into a few families that work together on the lab bench. The longest-running in the sources is the SOLO, a programmable automated pipettor. In May 2008 SelectScience reported new features for the SOLO, including support for a group of up to ten syringes of different bore sizes, and noted that it could be loaded by hand or by robot loading systems from most manufacturers.

The robot loader the company itself makes is the PlateCrane, a microplate-handling arm, which today includes the PlateCrane SciClops with extended reach. Plates can also be moved between instruments on LabLinx, an automated microplate delivery track. Tying the hardware together is SoftLinx, the company’s laboratory automation software; SelectScience described it in 2008 as having an icon-based, drag-and-drop method editor that oversees the movement of labware between instruments, and said that if SoftLinx lacked an interface to a particular instrument, the company would write one.

The current range, as listed on the company’s website, also includes the RapidPick colony pickers, the Micro10x reagent dispenser, the RapidWash microplate washer, the Rapid pH Plus automated pH meter, the CytoLoader for flow cytometry platforms and the Protean workstation. The company says it focuses on “designing and assembling” liquid handling, microplate automation, laboratory robotics, software and consumables, and that it also designs fully integrated work cells combining its own products with selected third-party equipment.

Hudson Robotics says its instruments serve drug discovery, high-throughput screening, proteomics and genomics. A November 2024 release by its owner described the wider group’s customers as mainly in pharma, biopharma, academic and OEM markets.

Design and documentation.

Laboratory automation is sold to scientists, and its makers tend to present it in a laboratory register: white or pale grey instrument decks, pipetting heads lined up over microplates, racks of tips and plates picked out in colour, and clean benches with little else on them. Product photographs usually show the machine from the front or from above, so that the layout of the deck, the channels and the labware can be read at a glance.

Software is part of the picture. Pipetting robots and plate handlers are run from method editors and touchscreens, and makers often show those screens next to the hardware, with protocol steps, plate maps and progress bars set in plain sans-serif type. The pairing lets a single page show both the instrument and the way it is run.

Many of the companies began with a single hand instrument and grew towards automation. Hamilton’s history starts with a glass microliter syringe of the late 1940s; INTEGRA Biosciences grew from a Zurich firm founded in 1965 into a maker of electronic pipettes and benchtop robots. Acquisitions of smaller specialists, in microdosing or in digital microfluidics for sequencing, have pushed the same businesses towards ever smaller volumes.

The trade meets at fairs and conferences such as SLAS, the meetings of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, and analytica in Munich, where makers show their instruments to laboratory buyers. Several of the makers in this round are Swiss or have Swiss sites, while others are based in the United States or the United Kingdom; their guides set those shared conventions against very different histories and owners.

Three brands under one Hudson name.

The company’s ownership changed in 2022. On 12 July 2022, the private equity firm Argosy Healthcare Partners completed a recapitalisation and merger of Hudson Robotics with Art Robbins Instruments, the Sunnyvale, California maker of protein-crystallography and liquid-handling tools founded in 2003, to form a single life-sciences tools platform, PrivSource reported. Argosy backed Andrew Witschi as chief executive and planned to invest in product development and in the SoftLinx software, according to the same report.

A second acquisition followed. In December 2023, Plant Automation Technology reported, the combined company acquired Tomtec of Hamden, Connecticut, a maker of automated liquid-handling instruments used mainly for sample preparation in mass spectrometry. Hudson’s website says Tomtec has been in business since 1967 and names its Quadra and Harvester instruments. According to the report, the deal added a further 96-head automated liquid handler to Hudson’s range and gave it an entry into sample preparation for bioanalytical work. Witschi said it would bring “Hudson’s core strength in integration and automation” to a broader set of instruments and new customers, and Tomtec’s chief executive, Sal Iacono, joined Hudson’s board.

On 4 November 2024 the group announced the appointment of Werner Maas as chief executive, in a release issued from Springfield, New Jersey, and Wayne, Pennsylvania. It described the business as Hudson, formed through the combination of Hudson Robotics, Art Robbins Instruments and Tomtec, headquartered in Springfield, which “designs, assembles and integrates” laboratory automation. Witschi moved to a new role as president of Hudson Robotics and head of technology.

The public face has moved with the merger. The hudsonrobotics.com address now forwards to hudsonlabautomation.com, a site branded simply “Hudson” that presents Hudson Robotics, Art Robbins and Tomtec as three brands of one company.

For a design guide, Hudson Robotics shows how a long-running engineering name can become one brand among several inside a merged group. Compare Opentrons, another American maker of pipetting robots, and Hamilton Company, another maker of liquid-handling systems. For this guide we use a deep navy, a cool white and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hudson Robotics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.