Surgeons make optimal use of all their senses to master difficult operations. When visibility is poor, they locate anatomy by palpation or they hear the optimal moment to stop drilling. Who would, today, entrust the own body to a surgeon that uses only direct vision, neglecting all the other information? Yet this is what the most advanced, semi-autonomous surgical robots of today focus on.
Similar to autopilots, the current robots follow a pre-defined path solely based on medical image data. But when things get difficult, they lack non-visual sensing capabilities and the human expert has to take over.
