My senior spring semester, I did a UROP with the MIT Little Devices Lab.

Among other health technology research, LDL is developing Firefly, an autonomous robot swarm prototype designed to be cheap but capable of performing biochemical assays. The swarm robots are cheap because they have no communication hardware. They don’t talk to each other directly.

Instead, to run experiments, the robots are designed with a complementary platform containing test tube incubators. Each robot contains a color sensor and an IR transmitter, and each incubator has an RGB LED and an IR receiver. With this, states can be encoded with color, and these states can be manipulated by the robots with IR commands. The robots can then read the incubator states by sensing their colors. Leaving trails in this way allows the robots to coordinate.

For my project, I aided the development of the Firefly system by designing electronics and embedded code for the incubator platform. Specifically, I designed PCB layouts and code for the individual incubators. I also designed two power distribution PCBs to supply 16 incubators from AC power adapters with 12V or 5V output.