Title: LAP: A Protocol for Agent-to-Instrument Communication in Autonomous Science

Abstract

Autonomous science is transitioning from proof-of-concept demonstrations to established infrastructure. While large language model agents now handle experimental planning and self-driving laboratories perform the tasks, each system currently reconstructs the connection between reasoning agents and physical instruments from the ground up. This process is complicated by fragmented vendor SDKs and standards designed for deterministic software clients, which are ill-suited for probabilistic, goal-directed agents.

While recent interoperability protocols have addressed two of the three edges in an agentic ecosystem—Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agent-to-tool interactions and Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) for agent-to-agent communication—neither adequately models the agent-to-instrument edge. This specific interface involves operations that are stateful, safety-critical, exclusively owned, physically embodied, and yield measurements complete with units, calibration data, and uncertainty.

To bridge this gap, we introduce the Lab Agent Protocol (LAP). LAP builds upon the peer-to-peer, discovery-first, task-lifecycle structure of A2A but introduces four physical-world primitives:

1. InstrumentCard: A signed description detailing capabilities and physical limits.
2. Exclusive Reservation: First-class locking mechanisms for instruments and samples.
3. Safety-Fence Handshake: Operator-confirmation tokens, cryptographically bound to specific tasks and parameters, to gate hazardous or irreversible operations.
4. MeasurementResult Schema: A structure ensuring results are physically typed (using QUDT/UCUM), calibration-anchored, uncertainty-bearing, and reproducible by design.

The paper specifies the protocol’s roles, a six-layer architecture, JSON-RPC methods, task and safety state machines, error models, and cross-laboratory federation. We demonstrate its efficacy by walking through a closed-loop autonomous campaign end-to-end. LAP is compatible with the A2A/MCP ecosystem’s transport layer and is designed to encapsulate, rather than replace, existing device standards such as SiLA 2 and OPC-UA.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-03 00:00:00 UTC