WetRobo: A Reproducible Robot Kit for Coding Agents in Biological Laboratories

Abstract:Automating biological research requires general-purpose, reproducible robot systems that allow individual wet-lab researchers to delegate robot tasks without performing teleoperation or neural-network training. Vision-language-action policies have been proposed for general-purpose arms, but can lose performance when their operating environment changes. We therefore built WetRobo, a robot kit that can readily transfer between laboratories. It consists of one robot arm, laboratory equipment (an incubator, a reagent bottle with a cap, and a Petri dish), the existing code that moves the arm, teleoperation demonstrations of each task that we recorded, and a general this http URL skill file. A biological experimentalist provides natural-language tasks without collecting local teleoperation training data or training a neural network. The coding agent observes the local laboratory and writes and executes programs, using external tools as needed for adaptation. We demonstrate use of WetRobo with OpenAI Codex (gpt-5.6-sol) on three successful tasks: lifting a Petri dish lid, removing a bottle cap, and opening the incubator door, all in real-world laboratories. The coding agent achieved the cap task in both laboratories, Lab X and Lab Y, whereas a VLA fine-tuned on Lab X demonstrations succeeded there but failed to transfer to Lab Y. These results point to a practical route for laboratory robotics: instead of training a policy for each laboratory, distribute a kit and let a coding agent adapt it in each laboratory. Code, demonstrations, and the evolved programs are available at this https URL.

9 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. Code and demonstrations: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.18435 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.18435v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.18435 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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