A team at UC San Diego has just had two humanoid robots complete live surgery for the first time in history. The robots were teleoperated, and successfully conducted two gallbladder removals on large, non-primate mammals.
The trials, which were covered in a paper published by Nature, act as a proof-of-concept that could one day allow surgeons to act remotely. In the first procedure, the robots were assisted by a human surgeon that was present. In the second procedure, the robots were able to tackle the operation by themselves.
The experiment utilized Unitree G1 humanoid robots, and standard surgical tools that were fitted with adapters for use with robotic hands. While successful, the surgeries confirmed that hurdles are still present: operations, naturally, took longer than when conducted by humans, and the robots had to be re-calibrated during the surgeries. Still, this was the first time such a task was completed not in a lab simulation, but in a real-world application. It opens the door for a world of remote procedures in the future that could benefit new sectors of the population.
“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” Assistant Professor of Surgery at UC San Diego, Shanglei Liu told UC San Diego Today. “So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space.”
