Surgical robot

Today's AI technology could help robots get the hang of conducting complex surgeries. Researchers have taught a robot surgical system to expertly perform a bunch of surgical tasks as capably as human doctors, simply by training it on videos.

In what's been called "a medical breakthrough on the verge of happening," scientists have built a soft robot with the capacity to carry different types of drugs through the body – in a device the size of a grain of rice, steered by magnetic fields.

At its core, this system uses a "simple" cross-spherical gear paired with a monopole gear to control pitch, roll, and yaw. With clever gearing, coupling, and sliding motions, however, the ABENICS gear is extremely precise in its movements.

Nightmare fuel? Maybe – but in a historic moment for the dental profession, an AI-controlled autonomous robot has performed an entire procedure on a human patient for the first time, about eight times faster than a human dentist could do it.

Sony has shown off its new surgical robot doing some super-precise work sewing up a tiny slit in a corn kernel. It's the first machine of its kind that auto-switches between its different tools, and has successfully been tested in animal surgery.

Among the cargo that just blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for the ISS were two firsts: the world’s first metal 3D printer designed especially for use in orbit and the first miniaturized surgical robot to be sent to the station.

Robotic surgical systems such as the da Vinci X are very impressive, with their two arms that are controlled by the surgeon's two hands. An experimental new system takes things even further, though, by adding two more arms controlled by the user's feet.

When someone has experienced a stroke, they may require a surgical procedure known as an endovascular intervention. A new MIT-designed robotic system could ensure that they receive the treatment quickly, even if the physician is nowhere nearby.

Researchers at MIT have developed a handheld robot that can help minimally trained responders to control severe internal bleeding in victims of traumatic injury, by helping them insert a needle and catheter into a major blood vessel.

While robotic laparoscopic surgical systems do make certain procedures safer and less invasive, those systems are still operated by human surgeons. Now, however, a surgical robot has performed a delicate operation entirely on its own.

A new tennis-ball-sized machine developed in a Harvard-Sony collaboration could open up some interesting new pathways in the field of robot-assisted surgery, with the ability to handle delicate tasks on a microscopic scale.

A delicate procedure called supermicrosurgery requires a high-level of expertise by surgeons, but they may soon have a new robotic tool at their disposal called Musa, which has performed its first round of procedures with great success.