MakerCamp
Research at Scale in Shenzhen 2026 | Jonny Cohen
Introduction Hi Everyone, my name is Jonny Cohen and I am a second year MIT Media Lab masters student in the City Science Group. My work is focused at the intersection of mobility and social robotics.
It is exciting to be back in China after first visiting in 2018 for factory visits and the production of the Bird Two Scooter. It is incredible to see how much China has changed in less than a decade.
First ridable prototype back in 2018:
Scalable-HCI Conference
All the Research at Scale MIT residents participated in the Scalable-HCI conference Scalable-HCI Conference during the first week. For the HCI conference I sumbitted my work on the P.A.N.D.A. project: a prototype for bio-inspired logistics robots.
Here is the Panda picking up a model parcel:
Poster
The Scalable HCI conference was sponsored by Unitree and so there were some of these robots dancing around:
Factory and Market Visits
A core part of the residency is learning from and how to work with Shenzhen’s innovation and manufacturing ecosystem. Shenzhen’s ecosystem feels quite different from the rest of China due to its density, diversity and proximity of different industries. In other regions, there could be a whole city that specializes in a particular process at scale (e.g. Die-Casting or Batteries), here we saw single buildings that went from raw materials to finished products with minimum order quantities in the hundreds.
Academic Visits
One of my main goals in Shenzhen was to understand how are robots are evolving and being used in public spaces in Shenzhen? To answer this question I wanted to visit companies, research labs, and see deployed robots in China.
I went on a tour of the SUSTech School of Design research labs. We saw a lot of exciting projects including this cool expressive lamp project (real life Luxor Jr.!) in Xueliang Li’s X-Group.
I visited Professor 孙效华’s lab who is a City Science alum when it was still HouseN. I learned about their research into service robots.
I went to HK to visit
Company Visits
Building Art Actuator
Originally, I wanted to develop a XIAO to Dynamixel board but after visiting Seeed, I learned that they introduced this product a few months ago. I wish I had know about this product before!
I wanted to rethink my project and was thinking how can we make prototyping robot motion as easy as possible?
EE Concept
I designed and ordered a dev board for the servo backpack project.
Here is the mechanical concept for the servo backpack.
(Servo, Mounting Bracket, PCB, and Enclosure)
Making Motors Fun
The below motor is reacting to the photodiode
Reflections: Shenzhen is an extremely interesting place. I feel lucky to have been selected to participate in this residency. Big thank you to Seeed and the other sponsors for making this happen. Another very big thank you to Cedric, Zinn, and Seungwoo for organizing this awesome program.
Hoping to be back soon!