Advanced Robot Surgeons
Today’s robots aren’t quite as impressive or independent as the ones we see in science fiction, but we may now have a robot that can perform certain surgical procedures on its own. In 2022, researchers at Johns Hopkins published results showing that their Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) could pull off a complex laparoscopic surgery in pigs that required it to reconnect the ends of an intestine. It even seemed to perform the task with greater precision than human surgeons.
For the foreseeable future, STAR and similar robots will likely only assist human doctors. But its developers envision a world where these bots can work on their own in emergency situations, such as treating trauma patients on the way to the hospital.
