UniLabOS: An AI-Native Operating System for Autonomous Laboratories

Abstract

Autonomous laboratories promise to accelerate discovery by coupling learning algorithms with robotic experimentation, yet adoption remains limited by fragmented software that separates high-level planning from low-level execution. Here we present UniLabOS, an AI-native operating system for autonomous laboratories that bridges digital decision-making and embodied experimentation through typed, stateful abstractions and transactional safeguards. UniLabOS unifies laboratory elements via an Action/Resource/Action&Resource (A/R/A&R) model, represents laboratory structure with a dual-topology of logical ownership and physical connectivity, and reconciles digital state with material motion using a transactional CRUTD protocol. Built on a distributed edge-cloud architecture with decentralized discovery, UniLabOS enables protocol mobility across reconfigurable topologies while supporting human-in-the-loop governance. We demonstrate the system in four real-world settings -- a liquid-handling workstation, a modular organic synthesis platform, a distributed electrolyte foundry, and a decentralized computation-intensive closed-loop system -- showing robust orchestration across heterogeneous instruments and multi-node coordination. UniLabOS establishes a scalable foundation for agent-ready, reproducible, and provenance-aware autonomous experimentation.