Japan opens a fully unmanned lab where 10 humanoid robots run 1,000 experiments a day
A fully staffless medical research lab just opened in Tokyo — and it could change how drugs and treatments get discovered. The Institute of Science Tokyo launched its Robotics Innovation Center in mid-April 2025, operating ten Maholo LabDroid humanoid robots with zero humans on site. Each robot performs up to 1,000 experiments per day, working 24 hours without fatigue or the errors that come with it.
The robot in the lab coat
Maholo LabDroid was developed jointly by Japan's national research body AIST and industrial robotics firm Yaskawa Electric. It has two articulated arms and handles delicate lab tasks — dosing reagents, cultivating cells, operating refrigerators and temperature-controlled equipment — without reconfiguration between jobs. That flexibility is the key differentiator: unlike conveyor-style automation built for a single task, Maholo is a general-purpose system that can swap between procedures the way a human technician would.
The robot is not new. It has been deployed at Kobe University Hospital since 2017 for clinical research into induced pluripotent stem cells. The Tokyo facility, however, is the first fully unmanned installation — no one is present on-site at any point.
Robotics Innovation Center director Keiichi Nakayama says the robots can accelerate research tenfold to a hundredfold compared with conventional labs. Japan holds roughly 46% of the global industrial robotics market and has particular motivation to automate: its population is aging sharply, and the country faces a widening shortage of skilled lab technicians.
The plan is to scale to 2,000 robots over the next 14 years, eventually automating the entire research cycle from initial hypothesis through to verification and publication.
Racing the US
Japan's humanoid approach puts it in direct competition with a different model emerging in the US. In March 2025, AI drug-discovery company Insilico Medicine added a bipedal humanoid called Supervisor to its fully robotic LifeStar1 lab, which has been running since December 2022. Insilico has cut average drug discovery timelines to 12–18 months against a traditional 2.5–4 years, synthesizing as few as 60–200 molecules per program, and already has 10 drugs with FDA investigational new drug clearance.
The strategic difference is significant. Insilico and most Chinese competitors use purpose-built, task-specific automation — efficient but inflexible. Tokyo's bet is that a general humanoid, capable of running any procedure without hardware changes, will prove more valuable over a full research cycle.
Nakayama puts it bluntly: "AI can formulate a hypothesis, test it, and write a paper without human involvement." What remains unresolved is accountability — when a fully unmanned lab produces a result that informs a clinical decision, it is not yet clear who answers for it. That's an ethical and regulatory question neither Japan nor the FDA has fully addressed.
