Launches, releases, funding and papers about agents doing hardware work.
Newest first, as we log them.
Filtered by
45 d ago
Asraful Haque and colleagues released an open-source toolkit for agent-driven RHEED (reflection high-energy electron diffraction) on a pulsed laser deposition system. It adds programmable electron-optics control, automatic beam alignment and rocking-curve capture, with analysis served over MCP. The paper describes a demo driven by natural-language requests. We found no code link.
2 mo ago
Anthropic opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, a shared driver spec for agents that operate lab and manufacturing devices. Each device describes its settings and enforced safety limits, and agents reach it over MCP, a CLI or code. In a QuEra case study, an agent-improved laser relock script worked in 99.3% of 700 trials.
2 mo ago
Zahra Ayar, Georg Fantner and colleagues published a paper on three MCP-connected agents that run an atomic force microscope. One converts plain-language requests to checked commands, one judges image quality and retunes imaging, and one diagnoses artifacts. In live experiments, the paper says, the tuning agent did as well as expert operators. No code is linked.
4 mo ago
Researchers put an LLM agent in charge of a trapped-ion experiment's ARTIQ control code through an MCP server. Every tool call needs a token bound to its contents, issued by a human or after a simulated run stays within device limits. The paper reports that the agent built a calibration stack and, with operator guidance, closed a magnetic-field stabilization loop.
5 mo ago
Chunhui Li and Wei Fan describe RFIA, an RF instrument agent whose LLM plans while a deterministic runtime operates the instrument. A knowledge base supplies verified skills, workflow templates and SCPI command lookup. On a commercial vector network analyzer, the paper reports all 16 benchmark tasks handled with both MiniMax-M2.7 and Qwen3.6-27B, including 1 expected safety rejection.
5 mo ago
Keysight has released version 0.1 of its MCP Server for Instrument Control as a Windows executable. The release notes list 18 tools that discover VISA instruments, resolve SCPI commands from each instrument's definition file and run them. An engineer approves a plain-language preview of every command before it reaches hardware. Sessions are logged, and a simulation mode needs no instruments.
