An End-to-End Robotic System for High-Precision Rack Insertion in Automated Laboratories*

Abstract

Robotic automation is essential for scaling autonomous scientific discovery, where long-term experiments demand reliability, reproducibility, and high throughput. A routine, yet challenging, operation in these labs is rack insertion, a contact-rich task requiring millimeter-scale precision and high sensitivity to error. Existing platforms often depend on fiducial markers or fixed placements, which limits flexibility and scalability in human-centric lab environments. To address these limitations, we present a mobile robotic system for highprecision, vision-guided rack insertion into an automated liquid handler (Opentrons OT-2). The platform consists of a Franka Emika Panda arm mounted on a dockable trolley, enabling modularity and extended workspace reach across different laboratory stations. The core of our approach is a zeroshot 6D pose estimation pipeline followed by a closed-loop vision-based refinement stage that iteratively corrects residual misalignments. Evaluated across four rack types and six OT-2 deck slots, the system achieved an average insertion success rate of 83.1%, demonstrating a practical end-to-end solution for autonomous rack handling in laboratory environments.