The Automated Microbial Analysis project aims to develop a system which is able to analyze a series of microbial samples on a special media called PetriFilm automatically. PetriFilm is a 3M product that is used in a variety of scientific capacities, mainly in food science and the medical field. PetriFilm is a very thin paper-like substance which has 2 layers: on one there is an agar media film that is used to grow bacterium, on the other there is a wax coating that is used to seal the sample from outside interference. A liquid sample can be applied to this agar film and left to incubate over a period of 1 - 2 days. After this time, the bacteria that were present within the sample will have had enough time to grow into colonies which are visible to the human eye. These colonies can be counted and the original number of bacterium per unit volume can be known from the original sample. The process to count the bacteria samples and categorize them into datasets is often tedious and can take a human operator around 1 - 2 minutes per sample. With sample sizes of 50 - 60, this process can easily take over an hour. The goal of our project is to use an automated system to count these bacteria colonies in sample sets of upwards of 100+ in as little as 20 minutes. This data will be automatically stored and tabulated within the client's original database. Being a robotics project there are inherent complexities that must be resolved between subgroups such as the electrical control of the mechanical design, computer commands for electrical control and how effective the mechanical design facilitates the overall process. With that, the project must maintain a high level of communication and simplicity so that all groups are able to understand how their design affects the overall system and others designs
