# LabRat

- **Event:** [The Harness Engineering & Model Wrangling #SFTechWeek Hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon)
- **When:** Sun, Oct 11 at 9:00 AM – 10:00 PM (PDT)
- **Where:** San Francisco, CA
- **Placement:** 2nd Place
- **Team:** [Jacob Valdez](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/jvboid)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/JacobFV/labrat
- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/rYxdj7l4Z5I
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/58

LabRat is a self-improving harness for a physical lab agent, running on a real bench: two SO-101 arms, a 3018 CNC carrying a servo pipette I designed during the hackathon, and an iPhone as the robot's eyes, ears and voice.

You give it a goal by voice or chat ("make the most orange well from red and yellow dye"). Claude recalls relevant past runs from typed long-term memory (MongoDB Atlas + Voyage AI), then designs and simulates 16 protocol variants in a 3D digital twin that models motion timing, pipette volumes, tip use, dye mixing and safety checks. The harness enforces one invariant: no real actuation without a passing simulation and explicit human approval, with soft limits, a G-code whitelist and watchdogs enforced by a local USB bridge.

After a real run, the iPhone camera measures the result and the harness improves itself: it refits its own simulator parameters (least squares, adopted only if prediction error drops), re-scores past plans, promotes winning protocols into procedural memory, and logs every update to Raindrop.

Problem: physical agents today act blind, forget everything between sessions, and never get more accurate. LabRat thinks in simulation, acts with permission, and remembers everything.

## More from The Harness Engineering & Model Wrangling #SFTechWeek Hackathon

- [PaperTrail](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/55)
- [Long Horizon Quant Research](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/56)
- [LLM deployment agent](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/57)
- [Hype](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/59)
- [The Data Graduate](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/60)
- [Uptime Harness](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/61)

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Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/mongodb-sftw-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/58. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt