Samsung Medical Center pairs two humanoid surgical robots with one surgeon in a simulated operation

Two humanoid robots worked with one surgeon through a simulated operation at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul on Sept 16, the hospital said on Oct 16. What SMC is testing is teamwork, not autonomy; the robot that cuts and sutures is steered through teleoperation by skilled staff in real time. The new element is two humanoids sharing one operation; the end-2026 phase-one evaluation will show whether that holds.

A surgeon drives the cutting robot in real time

In the first demonstration the robot held surgical instruments and performed incision, dissection and suturing on biological tissue. Skilled staff controlled its two arms through a control device, and the robot mirrored the surgeon's movements while the surgeon watched a monitor. Professor Yong Gi Jung, of Otorhinolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, said the robot does not assess a patient's condition on its own or operate autonomously.

The scrub-nurse robot runs the full instrument cycle

In the second demonstration, two humanoids worked with the surgeon. Robot No. 1 acted as scrub nurse: it understood the surgeon's spoken requests, identified the instrument, and adjusted the handle and the point of delivery so the surgeon could grasp it safely, then returned it to its place. Jung said the key is completing the full instrument cycle of request, delivery, use, retrieval and organization, as a human would during an operation.

Robot No. 2 acted as assistant surgeon and nurse: its left hand held a laparoscope and kept the surgical site centered on screen, and its right hand used graspers to retract tissue in a direction the surgeon specified.

SMC says other countries' robots largely aim to perform specific tasks as well as or better than humans, while its approach is an operating-room system with multiple humanoids sharing the surgical context as one team. The project is in a validation phase, testing instrument passing, endoscope operation, tissue retraction, voice commands and safe stopping in a simulated surgical environment. Everything shown came from simulated surgery, and the cutting robot was teleoperated; SMC lists repeated performance testing, simulated-environment and preclinical studies, usability evaluations by medical staff, a GMP quality system, clinical trials and regulatory approval as a medical device as the path to commercialization. Jung says humanoid assistants can use existing operating rooms and instruments designed for humans, and SMC expects them to help fill the night-time, emergency and essential-care staffing gaps where skilled surgical assistants are hard to secure.

SMC leads a Korean ARPA-H project on a humanoid physical-AI surgical assistant, selected in 2025, and the robot was developed over the past year. The consortium, called ORchestra, includes Rainbow Robotics, AIDIN ROBOTICS, Haehaeho, the Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences & Technology, Seoul National University, the National Cancer Center and Jeonbuk National University Hospital. The program is supported by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the K-Health Future Promotion Division of the Korea Health Industry Development Institute, runs 54 months from July 2025 to December 2029 with KRW 13.835 billion in government research funding, and only teams that pass the first-phase competitive evaluation at the end of 2026 go on to the second phase.