User-centered automation process in synthetic biology research
Name
1020074003-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
6.71 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ff2451c13efc2cfdecb8a5fb2161138f
Author(s)
Nagata, Masakazu, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor(s)
Ron Weiss.
Date Issued
2017
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
By designing and re-designing biological system, synthetic biology is advancing a wide range of domains from biotherapeutics for fatal cancers to biofuels and artificial meat to improve the global environment and food security. As the scale and complexity of synthetic biology endeavors are increasing, designing automation processes to replace manual labor is becoming more important to improve cost effectiveness, reproducibility, and efficiency including error reduction. Despite the desire for lab automation in the research and industry, in reality, scientists still largely rely on manual techniques in the labs even though the conventional approach becomes unmanageable and slows down their research iterations. One of the key problems is the mental barrier. According to the online survey and interviews conducted in this research, almost 90% of researchers cannot trust the quality of robot's work even though they do not know the actual success rate of the robotics work and what the robot can do. To bridge the gap for making the automation process more accessible, this research is proposing the use of "Bot", a software robot with which people can communicate through the internet and "Internet of things (IoT)". In the system, Bot is connected with the lab automation robots such as liquid handling robots. By communicating with the Bot using user-interfaces such as Slack, researchers can place work orders on lab robots and monitor their order status anytime. Moreover, people can directly ask the Bot for important information and instructions, such as protocol success rate and scheduling.
Description
Thesis: S.M. in Engineering and Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 45-46).
Subjects
Engineering and Management Program.
Integrated Design and Management Program.
System Design and Management Program.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program
System Design and Management Program.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Integrated Design and Management Program
Terms of Use
MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
