The New York startup Kyber Labs has trained its highly dexterous robotic hand to do the job of a trained lab technician.
The Brooklyn-based robotics firm just shared footage of its five-fingered end effector executing on a 42-step workflow it generated from a simple lab request. According to Kyber, the robot’s artificial intelligence breaks the task into smaller actions and performs them sequentially.
In just under 4 minutes, the mechanical hand opens test tubes to access samples, presses a tube into a vortex mixer to rapidly spin and mix its contents, uses a pipette to precisely measure and transfer small amounts of liquids between containers, loads the tubes into a centrifuge and activates a spin cycle to separate the different components based on density, and then returns each sample to its exact position.
The startup, launched in 2022, stressed that the actions are all autonomous with no teleoperation. The robotics firm built the demo in collaboration with a clinical pathology lab, which analyzes blood samples to diagnose diseases.
The robot hands features a reported 20 degrees of freedom (DoF), with tendon-driven joints that work similarly to human muscles. Kyber says it’s working toward a dual-arm robotic platform for tasks requiring human-level precision like lab work and product assembly.
Kyber Labs was founded by Tyler Habowscki, a former SpaceX/Machina Labs engineer, and Yonatan Robbins, an industrial designer who’s created everything from medical devices to movie props. The startup has a lean engineering team and has raised an estimated $1.7 million in pre-seed funding.
