i became british for a summer by Anika H. '26
featuring an internship at bristol robotics lab
I worked in Bristol Robotics this summer through MISTI, MIT’s travel abroad program. I figured this could be fun, getting to work somewhere cool and also play tourist on the weekend in another country, but even the internship alone was by far the best work/research experience I’ve had. I met wonderful people that I’m still friends with and was genuinely excited about the research enough that I continued working on it (at least for now before I get hosed) after the internship ended. Over the summer, we made a human-hand-sized robotic hand with touch sensing.
cool people!
Part of what I liked so much about the job was that I got to see and help with so many other projects and assistive tech. One grad student was working on a robot that could perform manual labor tasks, and I helped her paint an imaginary wall for half an hour as she collected data on arm movements. Jebby helped with a group designing a smart walker with crash detection and voice activation. I think Maddie, the other MISTI student from my group, got the coolest gig of walking around in a space suit with a pneumatic exoskeleton as they logged movement data.
I worked in the Dextrous Robotics group. My direct supervisor was technically Nathan, but because his schedule was packed so full it practically overflowed, we only saw him once or twice a week when we had group meetings. When he was here though, he would ask so many good questions it made up for him never being around. He seems to be popular around the lab (there are 3D prints of his head on some desks). When I had questions, I usually went to annoy Chris. He had his own projects to work on so I tried not to bother him too much, but when I inevitably needed clarification on something, he would pause mid-task to help me unless he was in the middle of a meeting.
Our group didn’t usually hang out during lunch, so when I saw Jebby with a bunch of people on her first day at work, I went “ooh, new friends!” And snuck my way into their group under the pretense of also wanting to help do the daily crossword puzzles.
the usual suspects at lunch
When I first met them, I did the very American thing of “Hi! My name is Anika and here are all my hobbies and interests” from force of habit, despite the MISTI culture training sessions. I also tried to stop myself from yapping too much, though that eventually got easier as I had slightly less to say after the first month or so.
:|
One of the best parts of the internship were all the people here, who were all effortlessly cool, funny, well traveled, or insanely cracked at the research they do, or some combination of all of these things. Unlike the US, there’s no social pressure to talk in the UK. You can just vibe with the group and they’ll be totally fine with just having your presence around, but the more I hung around, the more I wanted to get to know them better. Fortunately for me, they didn’t seem to mind if I talked either (until I got comfortable enough to pull out my terrible terrible British accent).
cool people
We went out to the pub together a few times to hang out and get drinks. We yapped about stupid things for 4 hours straight, and raved about the hot nuts they sold. You could get a cup full of “spicy” crunchy peanuts for 2.50 pounds and it was worth every pence. Right before our internships ended, Yash, Jebby, and I went to see Superman together and walked around the city until late in the night. By the end of the summer, I made some incredible friends.
Incoming Nerd Dump!!!!!
electronics
Because I was the one electrical engineer out of three other mechanical engineers working on the project, I got the really fun task of designing the fingertip and electronics that were meant to fit inside it. The main challenge was that everything had to fit into less than 4 cubic centimeters. This meant that the circuit ended up being the easy part and the layout was an absolute pain. Between the USB-C port, an FPC connector for the camera, another one for the LEDs, and the smallest ESP32 I could find (an ESP32-S3-PICO), I crammed it onto a two layer PCB that I couldn’t physically shrink any more than I already had.
teeny little board
While initially thought it was a great idea because everything fit neatly on the back of the fingertip, it soon came back to bite me in the behind when I realized I had to solder everything on by hand. If we ordered the board preassembled, I would have left before it even arrived, leaving no time to test it, which meant we ordered the parts and the PCB separately. I thought I was good at PCB assembly before I experienced the pain of having to nudge ten different 0402 packages onto their pads with a pair of tweezers and a soldering iron after forgetting to turn down the airflow on the heat gun. For context, rolling one of those around between your fingers feels like having a literal grain of sand. I still believe every EE should have to assemble a PCB by hand and deal with 0402s at least once. It builds character. >:)
The worst part, however, was the 6mm by 6mm ESP32 package. Since the pads were on the bottom of the chip and inaccessible from the side, I stenciled on the solder paste, dropped the chip on as squarely as I could, hot plated the board (or heatgunned if I decided to take off and replace the chip entirely), and prayed to the EE gods that I wouldn’t have to reflow it another 10 times to get the contacts to touch correctly. If you couldn’t guess already, I had to do just that during testing anyways. The technicians ended up helping a lot with my mishaps.
step 1: glue together grains of sand with hot metal. step 2: crash out. (Shoutout to Simon, Tom#2, and Jason for helping me not die from SMT soldering.)
I’m very happy I got to keep my stupid little board because after the amount of effort I put into it, I started developing some amount of emotional attachment to it. And despite how much frustration went into its creation, the hands on part the last week was probably some of the most fun I had.
CADding it up
Before the internship, I knew enough CAD to get around and make most simple things, but practice makes better and boy did I get a lot of practice. After spending half the summer fighting Fusion 360 and getting ragebaited by the sheer number of times it crashed near the end, I am now way better at Fusion 360 than Solidworks and Onshape, the two programs I used before.
a regular day
They had a multimaterial 3D printer which I used a lot for prototyping the housing of the fingertip. On the second print, I ran into an issue where the clear acrylic was printing opaque. After bug-hunting in futility for some time, I relented and went to the technicians for help. It was not the accidental slot I made near the base or even the slightly asymmetrical filets on the left and right side, but the little “texture override” button that I forgot to click.
When I finished the main fingertip and was still waiting for the boards and components to arrive, I started making an alternate version designed to have a more textured pad for better grip. It turned out pretty cool looking, but I haven’t really had the chance to test it yet.
adventuring
Because I couldn’t comfortably last a summer without fire, I spent a month looking and found a local firespinning group. We’d spin together every two or three weeks in the evenings, usually in Eastville Park, which was quite fun because the fastest way to get there from my apartment was to hike through a little path in the woods.
The firespinners here are as weird as me and my friends back home, also rocking dyed hair and picking wild blackberries as snacks on the way to work. People were friendly and there was always someone new at the fire jams. I brought a pair of poi, which I didn’t spin too much of before the summer, and learned a ton of new tricks from people. I met someone I watched online tutorials from, professionals who spin fire full time, crafters who made their own custom props, and so many other incredible people.
one of the poi spinners spinning fire wire
I traveled a lot on the weekends with Jebby. We played tourist on Saturdays and spent most of Sunday sleeping in and lounging around.
We museum-maxxed for most cities we visited, going to multiple art museums, natural history museums, local history museums, and the very famous one where the British stole everyone’s stuff (tbf, it was quite cool to look at).
One of the parts I liked the most were the amount of green spaces there were, at least in the area I was living in. I could walk 15 minutes in one direction and get to a massive park or walk 20 minutes in another direction and get to an even more massive park. There were little paths under roads and between houses everywhere and if felt like any of these shortcuts could have landed me in Narnia.
baby duck season at one of the local parks
We went punting in Oxford! The streams in the area are quite shallow, which means you can take long pole and push off the bottom of the river to go forward. It was a bit of a learning curve and really hard to steer (we were crashing into the river bank every 20 feet), so I fully gave up and started using the long pole like a two sided paddle. We looked ridiculous, but our boat was going twice as fast as everyone else on the river. Just as we turned around to head back, we achieved the complete tourist experience of getting flirted at by a group of college-age-looking dudes while looking like complete idiots.
The last week after our internship, we got to do basically anything we wanted, so we went to the Jurassic Coast to go fossil hunting. Once we got to the part of the beach with dark stick oxford clay, we found some fragments. Our haul at the end was one piece of a fossilized clam shell, and about eight or so fragments of tube worms.
I’m happy to be back at school now though! I missed all my friends and can finally fulfill my need to pet cats every day.