Humanoid robots just removed gallbladders from live pigs. No, the robots didn’t do it alone — skilled surgeons controlled them remotely.
The experiment, published in Nature, used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot with a starting price of $13,500. That’s pocket change compared to specialized surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system, which runs between half a million and several million dollars and weighs about 1,800 pounds.
The G1 is 5 feet tall, weighs 60 pounds, and takes up a fraction of the space. “It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” said Dr. Shanglei Liu, assistant professor of surgery at UC San Diego. “So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space.”
The UC San Diego team built physical adapters so the robot — nicknamed “Surgie” — could hold surgical tools. Surgeons operated from a console with a stereo headset and foot pedal. The first surgery had a human assistant alongside the robot. The second used two robots working together.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. The team had to pause frequently to recalibrate. The robot’s arm span of 450mm (compared to 1.6-1.8m for an adult human) limited reach. Latency in the hundreds of milliseconds is still above the 150ms threshold considered ideal for telerobotic surgery. The surgeries took “much longer” than with existing systems.
But that’s the point of a preclinical trial. Find the problems now. The team is working on improvements and exploring the idea of an “autonomous surgical assistant” that could handle basic tasks like fetching tools or cleaning up. Full autonomy in surgical robots is still a long way off, but teleoperated humanoid robots for remote surgery in underserved areas? That’s getting closer.
