A Closed-Loop Robot Scientist for Autonomous Biological Discovery
Biological systems respond to a wide range of physical inputs and an overarching goal of biological research is understanding how these signaling events coordinate cellular, tissue, and organism-level outcomes. Yet the vast combinatorial space of physical and chemical interventions that influence these processes remains largely unexplored. Thus, a search process is required that efficiently learns how inputs affect a biological target via a series of automatically generated interventions, and a robot scientist that can conduct them. To this end we here introduce the Multimodal Organismal Modulation Robot (MOMbot), a robot scientist that integrates four physical intervention modalities - chemical delivery, electrical field application, mechanical vibration, and thermal modulation -within a single hardware platform. MOMbots multimodal hardware is paired with high-resolution imaging and an online active learning algorithm that autonomously generates, executes, and refines interventions based on accumulated data. We validate the system across biological materials spanning three orders of magnitude in scale, including Xenopus laevis embryos, motile mucociliary organoids, and disaggregated ectodermal stem cells, to show the utility of this approach across diverse biological disciplines. Using these biological models, we demonstrate precise thermal control of embryonic developmental rate, automated chemical perturbation with behavioral readouts, programmable electrical field stimulation, and vibrational assembly of functional mucociliary organoids from loose cells. We also describe the active learning algorithm that autonomously concentrates interventions near regions of maximal outcome uncertainty, yielding sample-efficient discovery of an electrical duration-response relationship for motile organoids. These results establish MOMbot as a scalable robot/AI scientist team for biological discovery, enabling autonomous, multimodal physical experimentation and AI-driven exploration of complex biological systems.