Human-AI Co-Embodied Intelligence for Scientific Experimentation and Manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel human-AI co-embodied system that combines human expertise, agentic AI, and wearable hardware to improve scientific experimentation and manufacturing, achieving higher accuracy, error correction, and new fabrication capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents the APEX system, a new paradigm of physical AI that enhances microfabrication processes through seamless human-AI collaboration and real-time error correction.

Findings

APEX system achieves 51% higher understanding accuracy than existing models.

Real-time detection and correction of fabrication errors.

Enables fabrication of complex neural probes at wafer scale.

Abstract

Scientific experimentation and manufacturing rely on prolonged protocol development and complex, multi-step implementation, which require continuous human expertise for precise execution and decision-making, limiting interpretability and scalability. Here, we introduce human-artificial intelligence (AI) co-embodied intelligence, a new form of physical AI that unites human researchers, agentic AI, and wearable hardware. In this paradigm, humans provide precise execution, while agentic AI contributes contextual reasoning, adaptive planning, and analysis. The wearable interface continuously captures experimentation and manufacturing, facilitating seamless communication between humans and AI. We instantiate this paradigm in a microfabrication cleanroom, leading to the agentic-physical experimentation (APEX) system which understands fabrication procedure with accuracy 51% higher than state-of-the-art multimodal large language models/vision language models (LLMs/VLMs), detects and corrects fabrication errors in real-time, and transfers procedural expertise to novice users. Critically, APEX system enables the co-development of fabrication protocols in cleanrooms, overcoming the incompatibility of elastomeric materials in standard microfabrication processes and enabling previously unattainable fabrication outcomes, as demonstrated by the wafer-scale realization of brain-level soft neural probe capable of single-unit-resolution neural recording. These results establish the human-AI co-embodied intelligence that extends agentic reasoning beyond computation into the physical domain, transforming scientific experimentation and manufacturing into autonomous, traceable, interpretable and scalable processes.