一句话：提出全栈数字微流控自动化平台 Puddle，其运行时提供高层 API、动态资源管理与实时纠错，实现可靠执行。
微流控设备可自动执行湿实验流程，但现有平台往往不灵活、易出错、昂贵且难以编程。本文提出全栈数字微流控自动化平台 Puddle，核心是提供微流控操作高层 API 的运行时系统。它动态管理流体资源，使程序可自由混合常规计算与微流控操作，从而比先前工作更具表达力；并通过计算机视觉实现实时纠错，在低成本液滴微流控设备上实现鲁棒执行。作者在自研低成本硬件上部署整个栈，并全自动执行 PCR 与 DNA 测序制备协议进行评估；这些协议结合试剂输入输出、样品加热与数据分析等计算和流体操作，同时评估自动纠错对系统可靠性的影响。
Microfluidic devices promise to automate wetlab procedures by manipulating small chemical or biological samples. This technology comes in many varieties, all of which aim to save time, labor, and supplies by performing lab protocol steps typically done by a technician. However, existing microfluidic platforms remain some combination of inflexible, error-prone, prohibitively expensive, and difficult to program. We address these concerns with a full-stack digital microfluidic automation platform. Our main contribution is a runtime system that provides a high-level API for microfluidic manipulations. It manages fluidic resources dynamically, allowing programmers to freely mix regular computation with microfluidics, which results in more expressive programs than previous work. It also provides real-time error correction through a computer vision system, allowing robust execution on cheaper microfluidic hardware. We implement our stack on top of a low-cost droplet microfluidic device that we have developed. We evaluate our system with the fully-automated execution of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and a DNA sequencing preparation protocol. These protocols demonstrate high-level programs that combine computational and fluidic operations such as input/output of reagents, heating of samples, and data analysis. We also evaluate the impact of automatic error correction on our system's reliability.
@inproceedings{paperbot4917,
title = {Puddle},
author = {Max Willsey and Ashley P. Stephenson and Chris Takahashi and Pranav Vaid and Bichlien H. Nguyen and Michal Piszczek and Christine Betts and Sharon Newman and Sarang Joshi and Karin Strauss and Luis Ceze},
booktitle = {ASPLOS},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1145/3297858.3304027}
}