Surgical Robotics

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Overview

Surgical robotics studies robotic tools and systems that support clinicians, from teleoperated procedures to autonomous assistance. Approaches combine mechanisms such as continuum robots and steerable catheters with remote-center-of-motion control, haptics, and perception methods for tracking instruments and reconstructing anatomy. Learning methods include imitation learning, reinforcement learning, vision-language-action models, and world models, evaluated in simulation and on platforms such as the dVRK, with video benchmarks including JIGSAWS and EndoVis. A central challenge is translating results from simulation, phantoms, and animal studies into reliable clinical systems that generalize across anatomy and equipment while enforcing safety and keeping clinicians involved.

Latest papers

CardsList

192 papers29 papers in the last four weeks, up 7% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Design, Modelling and Characterisation of a Miniature Fibre-Reinforced Soft Bending Actuator for Endoluminal Interventions

    Mar 25, 2026Xiangyi Tan, Aoife McDonald-Bowyer, Danail Stoyanov +1Soft Pneumatic ActuatorsSoft Robotics

    All authors are with the UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, WC1E 6BT, UK.

  2. PinPoint: Monocular Needle Pose Estimation for Robotic Suturing via Stein Variational Newton and Geometric Residuals

    Mar 24, 2026Jesse F. d'Almeida, Tanner Watts, Susheela Sharma Stern +3Object Pose EstimationSurgical Instrument Tracking

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA. · The Robotics Center and the Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

  3. Instrument-Splatting++: Towards Controllable Surgical Instrument Digital Twin Using Gaussian Splatting

    Mar 24, 2026Shuojue Yang, Zijian Wu, Chengjiaao Liao +5Digital Twins3D Gaussian Splatting

    Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NUS.

  4. Feasibility of Augmented Reality-Guided Robotic Ultrasound with Cone-Beam CT Integration for Spine Procedures

    Mar 23, 2026Tianyu Song, Felix Pabst, Feng Li +5AR in SurgeryRobotic Ultrasound

    Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures(CAMP), Technical University of Munich(TUM), Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany

  5. Investigating a Policy-Based Formulation for Endoscopic Camera Pose Recovery

    Mar 20, 2026Jan Emily Mangulabnan, Akshat Chauhan, Laura Fleig +7Camera Pose EstimationVisual Odometry

    Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD 21218, USA · Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore MD 21218, USA

  6. TiBCLaG: Hybrid design approach for a trigger-induced bistable compliant laparoscopic grasper

    Mar 19, 2026Joel J Nellikkunnel, Prabhat KumarMechanism DesignRobotic Grasping

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Telangana 502285, India

  7. SutureFormer: Learning Surgical Trajectories via Goal-conditioned Offline RL in Pixel Space

    Mar 19, 2026Huanrong Liu, Chunlin Tian, Tongyu Jia +8Offline RLTrajectory Prediction

    Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau, China · University of Macau Advanced Research Institute in Hengqin, Zhuhai, China · Senior Department of Urology, The Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China +4

  8. Final Report for the Workshop on Robotics & AI in Medicine

    Mar 18, 2026Juan P WachsRoboticsAssistive Robotics

  9. Speak, Segment, Track, Navigate: An Interactive System for Video-Guided Skull-Base Surgery

    Mar 17, 2026Jecia Z. Y. Mao, Francis X. Creighton, Russell H. Taylor +1Surgical Instrument TrackingSurgical Video Understanding

  10. Surgical Robot, Path Planning, Joint Space, Riemannian Manifolds

    Mar 16, 2026Yoshiki Yamamoto, Maina Sogabe, Shunichi Hirahara +3Robot Motion PlanningMotion Planning

    The University of Tokyo, Department of Information Physics and Computing, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan · The University of Tokyo, Department of Precision Engineering, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan · National Institute of Informatics, Principles of Informatics Research Division, Tokyo, 101-8430, Japan

  11. Dynamic Model Identification and Gravity Compensation for the dVRK-Si Patient Side Manipulator

    Mar 12, 2026Haoying Zhou, Hao Yang, Brendan Burkhart +6Robot Dynamics IdentificationSurgical Robotics

    Department of Robotics Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA 01609, USA. · Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, MD 21218, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, TN 37212, USA. +1

  12. Real-time Rendering-based Surgical Instrument Tracking via Evolutionary Optimization

    Mar 12, 2026Hanyang Hu, Zekai Liang, Florian Richter +1Visual Object TrackingCovariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA.

  13. TopoOR: A Unified Topological Scene Representation for the Operating Room

    Mar 10, 2026Tony Danjun Wang, Ka Young Kim, Tolga Birdal +2Higher-Order GNNsTopological Representation Learning

    Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany · Kyung Hee University, South Korea +1

  14. SurgCalib: Gaussian Splatting-Based Hand-Eye Calibration for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

    Mar 9, 2026Zijian Wu, Shuojue Yang, Yu Chung Lee +3Hand-Eye CalibrationSurgical Robotics

    Robotics and Control Laboratory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada · Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

  15. An Open-Source Robotics Research Platform for Autonomous Laparoscopic Surgery

    Mar 9, 2026Ariel Rodriguez, Lorenzo Mazza, Martin Lelis +4Laparoscopic SurgerySurgical Robotics

    Department of Translational Surgical Oncology, NCT/UCC Dresden, a partnership between DKFZ, MF UKD, TUD, HZDR Dresden, Germany · Cluster of Excellence-CeTI, TUD, Germany · Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD, Germany

  16. Extend Your Horizon: A Device-Agnostic Surgical Tool Tracking Framework with Multi-View Optimization for Augmented Reality

    Mar 9, 2026Jiaming Zhang, Mingxu Liu, Hongchao Shu +6Augmented RealitySurgical Instrument Tracking

    Johns Hopkins University · Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine · University of Arkansas, Johns Hopkins University

  17. SSP: Safety-guaranteed Surgical Policy via Joint Optimization of Behavioral and Spatial Constraints

    Mar 7, 2026Jianshu Hu, ZhiYuan Guan, Lei Song +5Robot SafetySurgical Robotics

    Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HongKong, China · Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, America

  18. SurgCUT3R: Surgical Scene-Aware Continuous Understanding of Temporal 3D Representation

    Mar 7, 2026Kaiyuan Xu, Fangzhou Hong, Daniel Elson +13D ReconstructionEndoscopic 3D Reconstruction

    The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. · S-Lab, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798. · Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, L69 7ZX, UK.

  19. SurgSync: Time-Synchronized Multi-Modal Data Collection Framework and Dataset for Surgical Robotics

    Mar 6, 2026Haoying Zhou, Chang Liu, Yimeng Wu +7Robotic Data CollectionSurgical Robotics

    Department of Robotics Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA. · Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. +2

  20. A Comprehensive Analysis of the Effects of Network Quality of Service on Robotic Telesurgery

    Mar 6, 2026Zhaomeng Zhang, Seyed Hamid Reza Roodabeh, Homa AlemzadehRobot TeleoperationSurgical Robotics

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22093, USA

  21. CT-Enabled Patient-Specific Simulation and Contact-Aware Robotic Planning for Cochlear Implantation

    Mar 5, 2026Lingxiao Xun, Gang Zheng, Alexandre Kruszewski +1Contact-Aware Motion PlanningCosserat Rod Modeling

  22. ArthroCut: Autonomous Policy Learning for Robotic Bone Resection in Knee Arthroplasty

    Mar 4, 2026Xu Lu, Yiling Zhang, Wenquan Cheng +3Surgical RoboticsRobot Learning

    School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. · Longwood Valley MedTech, Beijing 100176, China. · School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

  23. Learning Surgical Robotic Manipulation with 3D Spatial Priors

    Mar 4, 2026Yu Sheng, Lidian Wang, Xiaomeng Chu +6Robotic ManipulationSurgical Robotics

    University of Science and Technology of China · Tuodao Medical · Yale University

  24. Give me scissors: Collision-Free Dual-Arm Surgical Assistive Robot for Instrument Delivery

    Mar 3, 2026Xuejin Luo, Shiquan Sun, Runshi Zhang +2Healthcare RoboticsSurgical Robotics

    School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing, China

  25. Humanoid Robots as First Assistants in Endoscopic Surgery

    Feb 27, 2026Sue Min Cho, Jan Emily Mangulabnan, Han Zhang +7Healthcare RoboticsSurgical Robotics

    Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA. · NVIDIA Corporation, Bethesda, MD, USA. · Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD, USA.

  26. Multimodal Optimal Transport for Training-free Temporal Segmentation in Surgical Robotics

    Feb 27, 2026Omar Mohamed, Edoardo Fazzari, Ayah Al-Naji +5Temporal Action SegmentationSurgical Video Understanding

    Authos are with the Dept. of Robotics, Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

  27. Hybrid Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning for Sensorless, High-Precision Force Regulation in Surgical Robotic Grasping

    Feb 27, 2026Edoardo Fazzari, Omar Mohamed, Khalfan Hableel +2Force-Controlled Robotic ManipulationSurgical Robotics

    Dept. of Robotics, Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

  28. Automated Robotic Needle Puncture for Percutaneous Dilatational Tracheostomy

    Feb 26, 2026Yuan Tang, Bruno V. Adorno, Brendan A. McGrath +1Robotic InsertionSurgical Robotics

    Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · Manchester University Foundation Trust Wythenshawe Hospital Intensive Care Unit, Manchester, UK

  29. EndoDDC: Learning Sparse to Dense Reconstruction for Endoscopic Robotic Navigation via Diffusion Depth Completion

    Feb 25, 2026Yinheng Lin, Yiming Huang, Beilei Cui +4Depth EstimationDepth Completion

    All authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

  30. Strategy-Supervised Autonomous Laparoscopic Camera Control via Event-Driven Graph Mining

    Feb 24, 2026Keyu Zhou, Peisen Xu, Yahao Wu +3Surgical RoboticsVision-Based Robot Control

    Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China