Blood Diagnostic Robot Software

This project required the creation of a sophisticated, custom machine control and user interface software for a medical diagnostic robot being developed by a team at Harvard Medical School, for rapidly characterizing bacterial infections.

The software was required to drive various physical devices on the robot, including pumps, valves, and the optical systems of a small microscope - as well as performing data analysis on the generated images. This entailed the creation of low-level machine control software written in C, for driving the robot’s reagent transport and optical systems, a mid-level Python and XML layer to enable the machine to be dynamically reconfigured to handle different blood diseases and workflows without the need to recompile the low-level machine control code, and a high-level Python interface layer for interaction with the robot’s operators and administrators.