In industry, motion control and robotics is typically used to automate the movement, transport, or assembly of components or products in the manufacturing process. At the Berkeley Lab, motion control and robotics are used to automate scientific tools, improving the speed and quality of data acquisition. Our motion control applications include laser and X-ray optics alignment, sample positioning, precision control of magnet assemblies and speed control for audio reconstruction. Robots are used in special applications and particularly in highly repetitive task in genomics that can be replaced by a pick-and-place robot, or a task in an exclusion area such as placing a protein crystallography sample on a manipulator to perform X-ray diffraction. For both these tasks throughput is increased and error reduced by eliminating human operators.