Two robots that look roughly like people just reached inside a live animal and removed an organ. No film studio staged the scene. It happened in a lab in California, and it is a first for medicine.
Surgeons at the University of California San Diego used two teleoperated humanoid robots to remove the gallbladders from live pigs. The result was published in Nature on 8 July. It marks the first time humanoid robots have performed surgery on living subjects.
The machines did not act on their own. Human surgeons drove every movement from a console beside the operating table.
The point of the experiment was not to replace doctors. It was to test a simple question: can an off-the-shelf humanoid robot meet the precision and safety demands of real surgery? On this early evidence, the answer is a cautious yes.
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