Team Members & Role:
• Acxell Perez: Team Lead
• Om Patel: Design Lead
• Shiv Patel: Fabrication Lead
• Samantha DiGenova: Analysis Lead
• Beatriz Monteiro Alves: Evaluation Lead
Abstract:
The Human Robotics Systems Lab (HRSL) and Kearney Lab have been researching how quickly wounds heal in relation to the time of day at which they occur. This is important because it could provide insight on tissue regeneration and could also assist medical professionals in deciding how best to treat wounds. The labs’ current method of testing these relationships involves feeding tissue cultures at specific times during the day and extracting the media at other designated times, in order to establish a day-night cycle in the tissue cultures. However, this poses a few challenges for researchers working in the lab. One proposed study involves feeding the cells at 7:00 AM and again at 7:00 PM, which would require someone to be in the lab at those exact times for weeks to months on end. The goal of the lab is to automate the feeding and extraction processes so that human interaction is not necessary. The delivery and extraction modules are outside of the scope of this design project, but a rotating plate transfer robot that can hold four six-well plates, incorporated with a tilting mechanism to gather all of the liquid media to the side of each well plate to aid in extraction, was requested. The team’s final design can be seen below. The primary rotating plate is powered by a main motor, with four six-well plate supports attached by hinges to this main plate. The complete system would include two delivery modules and one extraction module, so for this design, the main plate rotates each well plate support to one designated location, where another motor will rotate the support upward to assist with the automated extraction process. These processes can take place at times set by the researchers using a connected LCD display, thus aiding in the adaptability of the design.
