Two humanoid robots controlled from afar performed two surgeries at the University of California, San Diego. According to a study published July 8 in Nature, this is the first time that general-purpose humanoid machines have been used on living subjects.
The outcome is important for the many people around the world who can’t reliably get in touch with surgeons. Small robots that a doctor can control remotely could be used in places where specialized surgical systems can’t reach.
In the first surgery, a robot and a real surgeon worked together. The surgeon helped take out the gallbladder with the machine. The second method went even further. There was no one at the table when the two humanoid robots worked together. The researchers say that both surgeries were done on large mammals that are not primates.
The engineers and surgeons who worked on the study called their robots “Surgie.” They are all 5 feet tall and weigh 60 pounds. The whole point is the light size, since a standard surgical robot like the ones hospitals already have weighs about 1,800 pounds. Setting it up takes a trained team, and operators often have to change the room to fit it.
“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room. So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space,” said Shanglei Liu, a senior author and assistant professor of surgery at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, who teleoperated the robot during the trial.
Why a humanoid robot instead of a specialized arm
Access is what the researchers’ case is based on. Michael Yip, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of the paper’s senior authors, says that a lack of surgeons is making wait times longer and making care more out of reach for many patients.
Specialized robots excel at a single task. The group says a humanoid can do many tasks since it’s equipped with the same tools and can move around like a person. The researchers did have to make adapters so Surgie could hold regular surgical tools. But they said the machine worked better with the current process than they expected.
“We were surprised at how well Surgie meshed with our workspace and workflow,” said Nikita Thareja, a study co-author and general surgery resident at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Yip explained the short-term goal as something that would help, not replace. The team sees Surgie get instruments during a procedure and clean up afterward because it can walk and do most physical tasks a person can. He said that an autonomous surgical assistant could help fill staffing gaps that prevent patients from receiving care.
The lag problem, and a crowded surgical market
The researchers were clear about what this could and could not do because it was just a proof of concept. During the surgery, the robots had to be re-calibrated several times. That took a lot more time than a normal surgical system would have known how to do. Liu said it was like the early days of a technology that is now widely used. He said that the very first robotic laparoscopic surgery took six hours and that the same procedure now takes only thirty minutes.
The other open question is latency. That’s the time it takes for the robot to respond after a surgeon moves a controller. It gets worse as the operator sits farther away from the patient. The team is working to get rid of that delay so that they can start working over longer distances and in more remote areas.
The work from UC San Diego comes at a time when the market for surgical robots has become much more competitive. It wasn’t hard for Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system to stay ahead in the United States for more than twenty years. This year, that changed. Medtronic tracked its first commercial cases in the U.S. with its Hugo robot and is now asking for permission to use it for more indications. MedTech Dive says that Johnson & Johnson sent a new request to the FDA for its Ottava system to be used in general surgery.
These competitors, along with CMR Surgical, Distalmotion, and Stryker, use the same type of specialized arms that the UC San Diego team is trying to avoid. Their systems are heavy, fixed, purpose-built. The humanoid pitch runs the other way. Light, mobile, general.
The approach fits a broader push toward robots that use plain human tools and take human-style instructions. Amazon now runs more than one million robots across its operations and recently showed a warehouse machine that takes spoken commands, according to Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting. UC San Diego is testing whether that same versatility holds up in surgery.
If you’re reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.
