UC San Diego Team Performs First Teleoperated Humanoid Robot Surgery in a Preclinical Trial, Publishing in Nature

Overview

Engineers and surgeons at the University of California San Diego say two teleoperated humanoid robots have completed two surgeries during a preclinical trial, a result the university calls a world first, according to UC San Diego Today. The work, a collaboration between UC San Diego engineers and surgeons, appears in the July 8 issue of Nature under the title “In vivo feasibility study of humanoid robots in surgery,” according to the study’s project page.

What We Know

In one procedure, a human-robot team made up of a single humanoid robot and a human surgeon acting as an assistant successfully performed a gallbladder removal, according to UC San Diego Today. A second successful gallbladder removal was performed entirely by two humanoid robots working side by side as a robot-robot team, the university said. Both procedures were performed on large non-primate mammals, per the official release; the project’s own companion site describes the work as involving “porcine in vivo studies” of laparoscopic cholecystectomy, including tissue retraction, dissection, clipping, and organ removal, according to the study’s project page.

The robots, nicknamed “Surgie,” stand 5 feet tall and weigh 60 pounds, according to both UC San Diego Today and Medical Xpress. Robotics trade outlet RobotToday identifies the platform as Unitree’s G1 humanoid robot, a characterization independently echoed by other outlets covering the study.

UC San Diego frames the result against the footprint of conventional surgical robotics: “Specialized surgery systems are typically equipped with three or four robotic arms, specialized tools and proprietary software. These systems weigh about 1,800 pounds, require a large team to set up, and take up a significant footprint in operating rooms,” the university said, a comparison also carried by News-Medical. RobotToday separately reports that a conventional system like the da Vinci costs between $500,000 and several million dollars.

Michael Yip, of UC San Diego’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said: “Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access. This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide,” according to UC San Diego Today. Yip added: “This study shows that humanoid robots have a viable future in the field of surgery. You can imagine these robots being deployed in remote communities where staffing is challenging, or in austere environments like search and rescue scenarios where a massive deployment of field medicine is needed in a short period of time.”

Nikita Thareja, MD, a general surgery resident on the team, said: “We were surprised at how well Surgie meshed with our workspace and workflow,” per UC San Diego Today. Shanglei Liu, MD, assistant professor of surgery, said: “It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room. So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space.” Ryan Broderick, MD, interim director of UC San Diego’s Center for the Future of Surgery, said: “This achievement reflects the power of bringing engineers and surgeon innovators together to solve meaningful clinical problems at our world-class training and research lab. Our center provides a setting to bridge engineering innovation and clinical expertise, allowing transformative ideas to be rigorously developed, tested, and refined.”

Yip also described a longer-term goal for the research: “One of our goals is to develop the autonomous surgical assistant. Many communities struggle with adequate staffing on the surgical team, which means patients are not being treated. Our goal is an operating theatre of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team to deliver procedures to those in need, both in traditional hospital settings as well as in non-traditional, field medicine scenarios.”

The Nature paper’s author list includes Zekai Liang, Nikita Thareja, Peihan Zhang, Calvin Joyce, Soofiyan Atar, Florian Richter, Garth Jacobsen, Shanglei Liu, Ryan Broderick, and Michael Yip, with affiliations at the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery at UC San Diego, according to the study’s project page.

What We Don’t Know

The full text of the Nature paper sits behind the journal’s access system, so quantitative task-performance metrics, success-rate breakdowns, and detailed methodology beyond what UC San Diego and the project page disclosed publicly are not independently confirmed here. Reporting on the robot’s exact purchase price and arm span varies between outlets and is not corroborated across multiple sources, so those figures are omitted. It also remains unclear when, or whether, teleoperated humanoid surgery will move beyond animal trials toward human clinical use; the university’s statements describe the work as a feasibility demonstration rather than a timeline for clinical deployment.

Analysis

The pitch behind the UC San Diego project is portability rather than raw surgical precision: existing surgical robot systems are large, expensive, and fixed in place, while a general-purpose humanoid platform can in principle be walked into an operating room, a field hospital, or, as Liu put it, deployed “anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space.” Whether that portability advantage survives contact with the realities of clinical safety, regulatory review, and surgical outcomes data is the open question the research does not yet answer — the trial reported in Nature involved animal subjects, not human patients, and UC San Diego’s own framing centers on feasibility rather than readiness for clinical deployment.