Abstract:

Coordinating the collision-free motions of multiple moving objects is a challenging problem, with applications ranging from automotive workcells to lab-on-a-chip devices. I will first describe our work on the coordination of multiple robots with dynamics constraints, with applications in manufacturing cells and UAV coordination. I will then describe the coordination of microdroplets in digital microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" systems. A digital microfluidic system controls individual droplets of chemicals on an array of electrodes; the chemical analysis is performed by moving, mixing, and splitting droplets. This promising new technology can impact applications in biological research, point-of-care clinical testing, and biochemical sensing by offering tremendous flexibility and parallelism through software control. Since the simultaneous coordination of even tens of droplets on the array is extremely difficult to program manually, we are developing modular array layouts and network-style droplet routing algorithms to automatically enable the flexible coordination of hundreds of droplets. I will discuss our ongoing work in applying these algorithms to enable versatile digital microfluidic biochips for problems in biology.