World first: surgeons teleoperate humanoid robots through live surgery

Teleoperated humanoids perform a world-first live surgery, 1X gives Neo tendon-driven tactile hands, and Mitsubishi Motors will mass-produce humanoids for its own factories.

TOP NEWS

Norwegian humanoid maker 1X unveiled new hands for its Neo home robot: tendon-driven, 25 degrees of freedom, with tactile sensing — and, per the company, the ability to wash themselves. Hands remain the hardest hardware problem in humanoids, and 1X is pitching these as nothing less than 'an API to the physical world.' More here (1X).

Mitsubishi Motors plans to mass-produce humanoid robots for its own auto factories, per Nikkei Asia and Yomiuri. Another carmaker deciding that humanoids are a build-it-yourself proposition, not a procurement line item. More here (Nikkei Asia).

LG Electronics has begun early production of its 'Axyum' humanoid robot actuators, pulling mass production forward by several months, Maeil Business reports. Actuators are the picks and shovels of the humanoid boom, and LG clearly wants a seat at that table. More here (Maeil Business Newspaper).

IEEE Spectrum reports from Ukraine, where remotely controlled ground vehicles fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers now patrol no-man's land, and roboticists envision a frontline almost free of humans. Four years of war have made the country the world's fastest-moving lab for ground combat robotics. More here (IEEE Spectrum).

THE BIG STORY

Humanoids scrub in: world-first live surgery by teleoperated robots

In a world first, surgeons teleoperated humanoid robots through live surgery: two robots performed gallbladder removals on live pigs in a preclinical trial at UC San Diego, per Ars Technica and a wave of follow-on coverage.

The point of the trial is deliberately modest — to test whether general-purpose humanoids are feasible in an operating room at all. The surgeons stayed in control throughout, with the robots acting as remote hands rather than autonomous operators.

One of the robots, nicknamed 'Surgie,' quickly became the face of the effort; Pandaily reports the platform is built on Unitree's G1, a commodity humanoid rather than purpose-built medical hardware.

That's the real story. Surgical robotics has long meant expensive, single-purpose machines; if off-the-shelf humanoids can be teleoperated to clinical standards, the economics of robotic surgery change dramatically. Pigs today, a long regulatory gauntlet tomorrow — but a marker has been put down.

Read the full story (Ars Technica)

MONEY

Mowito raised a $3 million pre-seed round to take its physical AI deeper into factories and warehouses, per Ascendants. More here.

South Korea's Daejeon Innovation Center launched a specialized space fund, with its first investment going to a robotics startup working on lunar base construction, per VentureSquare. More here.

Unitree's imminent IPO — plus Tesla procurement guidance — sent Hong Kong-listed robotics stocks sharply higher, per Futu News. More here.

DEMO OF THE DAY

After many iterations, a hobbyist's quadruped finally climbs stairs using MPC and whole-body control with footholds picked from a depth-camera height map — and the entire stack is open source on GitHub. Watch.

RESEARCH

LingBot-VA 2.0 argues that repurposing video generators built for content creation is the wrong path for robots, and builds a video-action foundation model from the ground up for embodiment. Paper.

DexVerse offers a modular benchmark for dexterous manipulation across diverse tasks, sensory conditions, and robot embodiments — shared yardsticks the field badly needs. Paper.

ContactMimic trains humanoids to track explicit contact commands alongside keypoint trajectories, so 'sit on the chair' means actually making meaningful contact with the chair. Paper.

QUICK HITS

— A California regulatory delay could mean free Waymo robotaxi rides in the company's new Ojai vehicle for a few months, per Ars Technica.

— NVIDIA is bringing its AI tools to Hugging Face's LeRobot to help developers build smarter robots, per Interesting Engineering.

— The Robot Report traces ForSight Robotics' road to fully robotic cataract surgery with its surgeon-assisting JASPER platform.

— Hyundai put Boston Dynamics' Atlas into a live World Cup halftime show, where it delivered the game ball.

— Agility Robotics' CEO went on Fox Business to talk IPO plans and pitching Digit as an answer to labor shortages.

— A son converted a Unitree robot dog into an all-terrain mobility chair for his disabled father, per Yanko Design.