ImgBurn is my favorite burning application, let me get that out of the way first.
Pre-history: about 2-3 years ago I bought a Acronova DupliQ. Not liking their canned automation software much, I obtained the MF-Digital Baxter SDK (which works for the DupliQ) through unofficial means and wrote an AutoIT command-line application to tell the robot to do things, then wrote a batch file that would unload a disc and load the next disc every time the tray opened. Sadly since I am not an official SDK user (as I am not an MF-Digital customer...) I cannot distribute it.
So with that approach - if a program can start an action on disc insert and can eject when done (like iTunes CD import...), the script worked great. A slight modification to the batch file would be necessary to make it work with ImgBurn (you'd wait for the tray to be open for more than xx seconds so that the pre-verify tray cycle would not activate the robot).
And now for today:
But, a single 25-disc robot wasn't enough. I had to have more. Now I have a hobby...a passion...an obsession...an affliction...I collect robotic duplicators. A hell of a lot of them.
And I started documenting the serial protocols and coming up with a generic scripting approach (see http://hyperdiscs.pbwiki.com/ ). You can reach me by using the link at the bottom of the front page of the wiki if necessary.
L-UK: you might want to take a look at what spoon has done over at the dbpoweramp.com forums (beta forum, batch ripper sticky thread) - his ripper to automated device archtecture/interface is pretty simple (each of five actions is farmed out to a command line client), but therein lies the beauty, as anyone can develop "drivers" for it (as I have). If you mirrored his approach, I suspect you'd also want to add a "CycleTray" action to the five he has (Pre-Batch, Load, Unload, Reject and Post-Batch) for those people who have multi-drive robots (situations in which the core robot control application should have sole discretion on openng or not opening a tray so as to prevent robot/tray collision when servicing other drives).
-brendan