A Rapid Instrument Exchange System for Humanoid Robots in Minimally Invasive Surgery

Recent advances in actuation, control and learning have rapidly pushed humanoid robots from a distant vision towards near-term real-world deployment. Healthcare is a particularly pressing domain, in which staffing shortages and increasing care demand are widening the gap between clinical workload and available skilled labour. Although current automation has largely focused on digital and logistical tasks, much hospital work remains embodied, requiring mobility, manipulation and safe interaction in human-designed environments. Humanoid form factors offer unique potential, particularly for assisting with surgical tasks. Traditionally, robotic systems for surgery are purpose-built platforms such as Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical System, and it remains unclear how close current humanoid systems are to meeting the precision, control and safety requirements of minimally invasive surgery. Here we present a systematic evaluation of contemporary humanoid technology for laparoscopic surgical tasks. We develop a humanoid-based laparoscopic teleoperation framework using general-purpose instruments and assess its abilities through benchtop characterization, dry-laboratory user studies spanning diverse surgical experience levels and in vivo porcine studies. Across these evaluations, we quantify technical feasibility, task performance and clinical readiness relative to established surgical platforms. Together, our study provides an evidence-based assessment of current humanoid abilities and limitations for surgical applications, highlighting both their promise and key technical challenges that must be addressed before clinical deployment.

Current robot-assisted minimally-invasive surgery (RMIS) platforms provide a fixed console for the surgeon to view stereo endoscopic images and teleoperate instruments inside the patient. Several researchers have proposed the use of a head-mounted display (HMD) as a portable console, with video pass-through rendering of the endoscope images which, like the fixed console, restricts the operator to a single endoscopic viewpoint and limits depth perception. We present a digital twin-driven virtual reality (VR) teleoperation platform, where the digital twin is created from markerless perception of the surgical environment and streamed for display on the HMD. This overcomes the limitations of video pass-through by providing multi-view rendering and natural motion-parallax cues, enabling decoupling of the user's hand posture from strict instrument alignment. The system utilizes VR hand controllers to increase the teleoperation workspace and to improve the robustness and stability of instrument control compared to the hand tracking approach adopted by most prior systems. A 15-participant user study on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) shows that our VR platform significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art HoloLens 2 mixed reality baseline, reducing path length by 86% and jerk by 95%, while achieving depth perception confidence comparable to or exceeding the traditional console across all conditions.

Robotic laparoscopic surgery has gained increasing attention in recent years for its potential to deliver more efficient and precise minimally invasive procedures. However, adoption of surgical robotic platforms remains largely confined to high-resource medical centers, exacerbating healthcare disparities in rural and low-resource regions. To close this gap, a range of solutions has been explored, from remote mentorship to fully remote telesurgery. Yet, the practical deployment of surgical robotic systems to underserved communities remains an unsolved challenge. Humanoid systems offer a promising path toward deployability, as they can directly operate in environments designed for humans without extensive infrastructure modifications -- including operating rooms. In this work, we introduce LapSurgie, the first humanoid-robot-based laparoscopic teleoperation framework. The system leverages an inverse-mapping strategy for manual-wristed laparoscopic instruments that abides to remote center-of-motion constraints, enabling precise hand-to-tool control of off-the-shelf surgical laparoscopic tools without additional setup requirements. A control console equipped with a stereo vision system provides real-time visual feedback. Finally, a comprehensive user study across platforms demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provides initial evidence for the feasibility of deploying humanoid robots in laparoscopic procedures.