A Robotic Molecular Biology Laboratory
From HBRC Wiki
Speaker: Brent Roman
Overview
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) is a microbiology lab in a can. It operates , underwater autonomously executing a wide variety of chemical assays to determine species of microorganisms active in the water mass and some of the pathogens they are producing. The main applications of the ESP are in water quality testing, aquaculture, and research.
The system's primary design goals were configuration and programming flexibility, low energy use and small size. Actuators consist of a dozen or so precision DC servo motors driving syringes, clamps, rotary valves, a carousel and an elevator. All core sensors and actuators are managed by TI MSP430 microcontrollers networked via I2C. The main brain is a TS-7200 ARM9 CPU where the whole application runs under Linux in the Ruby scripting language
Brent will bring a prototype unit to demonstrate, including some on-the-fly scripting of new behaviors.
