Case study

Underworlds

A city's sewage carries traces of its residents' health: bacteria, viruses, chemical compounds. Underworlds, a project of the MIT Senseable City Lab and Alm Lab, set out to read those traces at city scale with a network of robotic samplers.

I built Luigi, the second-generation robot. It hangs beneath a manhole, lowers itself to the water with a motorized pulley, pumps up about ten liters of sewage, and runs it through an internal filter to capture a concentrated biological sample. Batteries and electronics are sealed off from a highly corrosive environment, the sample is protected from cross-contamination, and the filter comes out easily for the lab.

Luigi replaced an earlier prototype, Mario, with a leaner, faster, and cheaper design that could be built in series and deployed in groups. More at underworlds.mit.edu.

Credits

  • MIT Senseable City Lab

    • Carlo Ratti — Director
    • Newsha Ghaeli — Project Manager
    • Fábio Duarte — Project Manager
    • Alaa AlRadwan — Researcher
    • Aline Barros — Researcher
    • Alexander Belyi — Researcher
    • Paul Bouisset — Researcher
    • Cheng Dai — Researcher
    • Antoine De Maleprade — Researcher
    • Carlos Graeves — Researcher

  • MIT Alm Lab

    • Eric Alm — Director
    • Katya Moniz — Project Manager
    • Djenet Bousbaine — researcher
    • Ilana Brito — Researcher
    • Claire Duvallet — Researcher
    • Siavash Isazadeh — Researcher
    • Jared Kehe — Researcher
    • Fangqiong Ling — Researcher
    • Mariana Matus — Researcher
    • Isaac Rockafellow — Researcher

  • MIT Runstadler Lab

    • Jonathan Runstadler — Director
    • Christopher Bandoro — Researcher
    • Islam Hussein — Researcher

  • MIT Polz Lab

    • Martin Polz — Director
    • Kathryn Kauffman — Postdoctoral researcher

  • MIT Eltahir Research Group

    • Elfatih Eltahir — Director
    • Noriko Endo — Researcher

  • MIT CSAIL

    • Daniela Rus — Director
    • Shinkyu Park — Postdoctoral researcher

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