Der Roboter wird Sie jetzt sehen – humanoide Roboter könnten im Operationssaal ein Spielveränderer sein

From the article

As waiting rooms fill up, doctors get increasingly burnt out, and surgeries take longer to schedule and more get cancelled, humanoid surgical robots offer a solution. That’s the argument that UC San Diego robotics expert Michael Yip makes in a perspective piece out July 9 in [*Science Robotics*](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adt0684).

Why? Today’s surgical robots are costly pieces of equipment designed for specialized tasks and can only be operated by highly trained physicians. However, this model doesn’t scale. Despite the drastic improvements in artificial intelligence and autonomy for industrial and humanoid robots in the past year, these improvements haven’t translated to surgical robots. The scale of data required to train a truly capable artificial intelligence to perform surgery with today’s robots would be too labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive, especially on existing platforms and with current practitioners. Building datasets based on medical procedures also raises privacy issues.

But what if all the training data used by industrial humanoid robots could be made useful for training robots to perform medical procedures? This would be a game-changer, writes Yip, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The simplest way is to give arms and multi-fingered hands to our surgical robots, similar to the trend seen in industrial robots. Not only would this produce a new class of robots in the operating room—it would allow those robots to take full advantage of the AI foundation models that have been accelerating the capability of industrial robots learning new skills and assisting in a large variety of tasks.