Surgical Innovation

Ottava and da Vinci 5 compared on architecture, force feedback, FDA clearance, and OR footprint. A surgeon's technical breakdown for 2026.

Medtronic's Touch Surgery Aide brings real-time AI into live robotic procedures, starting with a safety application solving a risk surgeons rarely talk about.

NVIDIA is using simulation, synthetic data and reinforcement learning to train robotic systems for hospital automation and future autonomous surgery.

UC San Diego researchers used teleoperated humanoid robots to perform laparoscopic surgery in pigs, testing whether general-purpose robots can operate in the OR.

The biggest problem in battlefield trauma is often not the injury itself. It is the time between injury and surgery. SS Innovations is developing a system designed for that gap: a surgical robot delivered directly to the trauma zone. How Vimana Aero works The SSi Vimana Aero is a heavy-lift drone carrying two robotic arms. After landing near a casualty, it connects the system to a trauma surgeon remotely operating through the SSi Mantra command center. The robotic arms have s

Credit: Intuitive Surgical Cardiac surgery has always been the hardest challenge for surgical robotics. A valve repair depends on something robots still struggle to reproduce: touch. Surgeons feel tissue tension, resistance, and the difference between a secure stitch and a dangerous one. That is why cardiac surgery lagged behind urology and gynecology. In January, the FDA cleared Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci 5 for nine cardiac procedures, including mitral valve repair, tricu