Source: Ars Technica
This experiment shows the bottleneck for surgical robotics isn't dexterity or precision—it's autonomy. By keeping humans in direct teleoperation control, surgeons sidestepped the regulatory and liability minefield of truly autonomous surgery while proving humanoid morphology can match task-specific surgical robots in a living system. What matters isn't the robot's humanoid form, but whether this remote-control model becomes a cheaper, more flexible alternative to da Vinci systems that hospitals can redeploy across multiple specialties.