  Increasing the level of automation in pharmaceutical laboratories and
production facilities plays a crucial role in delivering medicine to patients.
However, the particular requirements of this field make it challenging to adapt
cutting-edge technologies present in other industries. This article provides an
overview of relevant approaches and how they can be utilized in the
pharmaceutical industry, especially in development laboratories. Recent
advancements include the application of flexible mobile manipulators capable of
handling complex tasks. However, integrating devices from many different
vendors into an end-to-end automation system is complicated due to the
diversity of interfaces. Therefore, various approaches for standardization are
considered in this article, and a concept is proposed for taking them a step
further. This concept enables a mobile manipulator with a vision system to
"learn" the pose of each device and - utilizing a barcode - fetch interface
information from a universal cloud database. This information includes control
and communication protocol definitions and a representation of robot actions
needed to operate the device. In order to define the movements in relation to
the device, devices have to feature - besides the barcode - a fiducial marker
as standard. The concept will be elaborated following appropriate research
activities in follow-up papers.
