IVF Lab Robot: From Hand Pipettes to ABB Lab Cobots

An IVF lab is one of the most hands-on places in medicine. Embryologists move eggs, sperm and embryos one at a time with fine glass pipettes under a microscope, and one slip can cost a patient a whole cycle. The IVF lab robot is meant to take some of that strain off people. This post follows the work from the first test-tube baby in 1978, through the joystick-driven micromanipulators used for sperm injection, to the robotic labs clinics started using in 2026. It also looks at where ABB's lab cobots, YuMi and GoFa, could fit. For now that is a possibility, since ABB sells no IVF product.

Dr. Uma Shrivastava uses a micromanipulator during ICSI training in Belgium. Photo: Trilokization / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How embryologists built IVF by hand

The first IVF birth came from a small team with simple tools. Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and the nurse and embryologist Jean Purdy developed the procedure, and Lesley Brown underwent it on 10 November 1977. Her daughter Louise was born on 25 July 1978 at Oldham General Hospital. The conception happened in a Petri dish, and Purdy was the first person to see the embryo's cells dividing. In 1980 the three founded Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridgeshire, which has since helped with the conception of more than 10,000 babies. Collecting eggs, mixing them with sperm and watching the embryos grow all depended on human hands and eyes.

Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridgeshire, founded in 1980 by Steptoe, Edwards and Purdy. Photo: Amy.waddell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The next big step made the work even finer. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, puts a single sperm straight into the egg. Classic IVF surrounds each egg with 50,000 to 100,000 sperm; ICSI needs one. Gianpiero Palermo and his team achieved the first human pregnancy with the method in 1991, and it spread to clinics treating male infertility. The embryologist holds the egg still with a blunt glass holding pipette on one side and pushes a sharpened injection pipette through the egg's outer shell from the other. Doing that well takes steady hands, good eyesight and years of practice.

ICSI under the microscope: a holding pipette steadies the egg while a fine needle injects one sperm. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The closest thing to a robot in those labs was the micromanipulator. It is a mechanical or motorised stage on an inverted microscope that scales big joystick movements down to tiny movements of a glass needle, paired with a microinjector that controls the pressure inside the pipette. A person still made every decision. The first robotic result came in 2023, when the Spanish start-up Overture Life reported the first two babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot, a device assembled at New Hope Fertility Center in New York City. An engineer steered its needle with a Sony PlayStation 5 controller, which says a lot about how early the technology was.

A microscope station with motorised micromanipulators and microinjectors. Photo: Pleple2000 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What automated IVF labs look like in 2026

Things have moved quickly since then. In December 2025 Conceivable Life Sciences published a proof-of-concept study in Human Reproduction in which three linked robotic systems did the Day 0 work: processing the retrieved eggs, stripping away the cells around them, preparing sperm and performing ICSI. Embryologists supervised and kept their hands off. In the 11 patients for whom all three systems were used, 64.3% of eggs fertilised and 42.2% became usable blastocysts. Twelve single embryo transfers led to five live births. Conceivable calls its platform AURA and says it automates more than 200 steps of embryo creation.

A clean IVF laboratory with a laminar flow workstation and a microscope bench. Photo: Dr. Jayesh Amin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Clinics are now putting these systems to daily use. On 25 June 2026 Overture Life launched its ICSI.A programme and placed its automated ICSI workstation at five fertility centres: CERAS in Peru, Memorial Hospital in Turkey, CENALFES in Bolivia, Seoul IVF in South Korea and Procrearte in Argentina. The company says the platform uses robotics and computer vision to standardise the injection while the embryologist stays in charge. In early July IVI RMA Global announced a partnership with Conceivable to bring AURA to a US clinic in 2027 and later to its clinics in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. AURA pilot studies have so far treated more than 100 patients and processed over 1,000 eggs.

A beveled glass pipette carrying a sperm enters a human egg during ICSI. Photo: Eugene Ermolovich (CRMI) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB has no robots in IVF labs today, as far as public sources show. It is moving into clinical labs, though. In July 2026 ABB Robotics announced a global collaboration with Roche Diagnostics on robots for clinical laboratories, starting with slide handling in pathology and autonomous mobile manipulators that carry samples between instruments. Similar jobs exist around an IVF bench. A GoFa CRB 15000 or a single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 could prepare culture dishes, move them between hoods and incubators or load cryostorage racks, while specialised machines handle the microscope work. Our post on hospital lab automation covers ABB's lab projects in more detail.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge in a lab. Photo: ABB

Where IVF lab robots go next

Over the next few years, automation will probably spread around the embryologist's bench first, and a lab with no people in it is still far off. Dish preparation, sperm selection and time-lapse imaging are the easiest steps to standardise. Conceivable reports that its automated dish preparation was more than ten times as consistent as manual work. Overture has said automation could make IVF cheaper and more common, and labs already face a shrinking workforce as patient numbers rise. Clinic owners will want to know whether a small lab can pay for a system that makes most sense at high volume, and nobody has published a clear answer to that yet.

An embryologist works at the culture incubators of Fertility Clinic Nordic in Estonia. Photo: Merlilindberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For engineers, the hard parts are well known. Eggs and embryos are sensitive to temperature, pH and light, so a robot has to work inside controlled hoods and keep dishes out of open air as much as possible. GoFa and YuMi were built to work next to people without fences, with limits on power and force, which suits a crowded lab. A cell like this is usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, so a lab can check reach, cycle time and the path from hood to incubator before anyone moves equipment. Any IVF use would still need clinical validation and approval from regulators.

An ABB GoFa cobot working with lab instruments at the SLAS lab automation conference. Photo: ABB

Trust may be the slowest part. Every company in this field says its system supports embryologists and leaves them in charge, and regulators and patients will want a named person responsible for each embryo. Training will change as well: the embryologist of the 2030s may spend less time at the joystick and more time checking what the machines report. For ABB, the realistic opening is the repetitive handling around the core procedure, the same kind of work it is now targeting with Roche in diagnostic labs. Whether that reaches fertility clinics depends on cost, proof of safety and whether labs prefer general-purpose arms or dedicated machines.

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

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