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Technology & Innovation Active Updated Jul 9, 2026

Humanoid robots enter the operating room

A UCSD team conducted the first surgeries using teleoperated humanoid robots, completing a gallbladder removal with a surgeon assisting a single robot and a second procedure with two robots working together, both on large nonprimate animals. Unlike conventional robotic surgical systems that weigh hundreds of kilograms and require purpose-built rooms, the Surgie robots stand five feet tall and weigh 27 kilograms. The arc will run as the field works toward human trials, with force sensing in soft tissue, precision, and clinical safety identified as unsolved problems in the Nature study.

The story so far

  1. Jul 9, 2026 Latest

    A UCSD team completed the first surgeries using teleoperated humanoid robots, including a gallbladder removal with a surgeon assisting a single robot and a second procedure with two robots working together on large nonprimate animals. The peer-reviewed study in Nature evaluated the platform across benchtop characterization, dry-lab user studies, and live porcine trials, and was explicit that precision, force sensing in soft tissue, and clinical safety are challenges that remain unsolved before any move toward human patients.

    Today Got Better

  2. Jul 9, 2025

    Johns Hopkins trained a robot to take out a gallbladder by watching videos of the operation, then let it work through the whole procedure on lifelike tissue. It succeeded on all eight it tried, adjusting as it went and taking spoken corrections, using the same architecture that runs large language models.

    Johns Hopkins University

  3. Mar 14, 2024

    The FDA cleared Intuitive's da Vinci 5, the first of its long-dominant surgical robots to give surgeons a sense of touch. Its force feedback cut the pressure put on tissue by up to 43 percent in testing, chipping away at one of the hardest problems in the field.

    Intuitive Surgical

  4. Jan 26, 2022

    An upgraded STAR, now at Johns Hopkins, did the same bowel-joining operation through keyhole ports in four pigs with almost no human help. Keyhole surgery is harder for a robot because it has to work through small openings on tissue that shifts and slides.

    Johns Hopkins University

  5. Mar 15, 2017

    A Science Robotics paper gave the field its ruler: six levels of surgical autonomy, from a machine that only holds still under a surgeon's hands at level zero to full autonomy at level five. Almost everything in the operating room still sits near the bottom of that scale.

    Science Robotics

  6. May 4, 2016

    A robot called STAR, built at Children's National in Washington, stitched together the cut ends of a live pig's bowel largely on its own, guided by 3D and near-infrared imaging. It was the first time a machine had run soft-tissue surgery in a living animal, and it sewed a more even seam than the surgeons it was measured against.

    Children's National Hospital

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