This is a very interesting comment because the project I am currently on is trying to assess viscosity with computer vision in basically the same way you are saying.

I am surprised you say that doing stuff is faster by hand, can you elaborate what you wife mean by this? Is the bottleneck the user-friendliness of programming the robots? Because I have a hard time believing the actual motion of the researcher pipetting beats the $500k hamilton liquid handlers... could be wrong though!