Pipette: An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics
arXiv:2606.12936
Pipette is an embodied simulation platform that provides open-source wet‑lab assets, a benchmark of 12 robotic tasks, and a data‑efficient augmentation pipeline to turn a few human demonstrations into large training datasets for wet‑lab robot learning.
Abstract
Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette provides over 100 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets through an extensible asset-building pipeline with built-in Tencent Hunyuan support for text- and image-conditioned 3D asset generation, and supports three robotic-arm embodiments through a unified simulation interface for task construction, data collection, augmentation, and evaluation. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, which replays human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce a 12-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 60.3% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 40.4% to 71.8% and pi0 from 37.3% to 44.1%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks
19 pages, 19figures