Comment by tolugenius

There are MANY packages in this space: Labs love to invent their own versions powered by the hubris of grad students. Anyway a random sampling of some I’ve come across is:

  - EPICS
  - TANGO
  - Bluesky (not that one)
  - QCodes
  - Sardana
  - yaq

The general problem is (1) i have a heterogeneous mix of hardware that speaks a bunch of different protocols from SCPI serial commands to VISA over USB, to bizarre proprietary things and (2) I want to be able to talk to it from one central computer and (3) ideally have some level of standardisation or abstraction so I can express an experiment like move <stage> from <x> to <y> in <n> steps and at each step fire <laser> and measure <signal> while logging <temperature>.

Anthropic seem to be creating the n+1 version of those packages and presumably doing some harness work to make Claude good at using it.

More like MCP for robotics. IMO they are better off getting the robots to use existing human UIs than trying to get hardware manufacturers to play ball.

It's hard to make LLMs read the manual for an invented language and have them improvise on the spot(1-shot). An established language or a command set that can be included in the training set to be used off top of their head is a lot more reliable and efficient.

The caveat is that actual utility of this particular command set isn't clear yet. Or how many LLM labs will find it worthwhile.

In the context of lab hardware there’s a ton of proprietary software and barriers to automating things. I think this is less about how to communicate, and more guaranteeing that “yes, this piece of hardware can interface with an agent” and is meant to do so. Kind of like using MCP vs letting your agent make raw HTTP requests

It seems more like a basic instruction set, that will then be translated to something actionable for each different device. Seems like most of the work then will be in developing the drivers for whatever devices you want the LLM to access.