LapSurgie: Humanoid Robots Performing Surgery Via Teleoperated Handheld Laparoscopy
Zekai Liang, Xiao Liang, Soofiyan Atar, Sreyan Das, Zoe Chiu, Peihan Zhang, Calvin Joyce, Florian Richter, Shanglei Liu, Michael C. Yip
AI summary
Problem
Specialized surgical robots are prohibitively expensive, large, and require dedicated infrastructure, severely limiting access to robotic minimally invasive surgery in low-resource settings. While humanoids offer a deployable alternative, their practical application in laparoscopic procedures remains unexplored.
Approach
The authors developed LapSurgie, a teleoperation framework that mounts commercial wristed laparoscopic instruments onto a G1 humanoid robot. An inverse-mapping algorithm enforces remote center-of-motion constraints to translate human hand movements into precise tool control, paired with real-time stereo vision feedback.
Key results
- Humanoid platform achieved weighted error scores comparable to the dVRK surgical robot
- Novice operators required significantly longer completion times on the humanoid than on dVRK
- Humanoid teleoperation reduced mental and physical demand compared to manual laparoscopy
- Successfully demonstrated precise bi-manual peg-transfer tasks using off-the-shelf instruments
Why it matters
This work lowers the infrastructure and cost barriers to robotic surgery, offering a scalable pathway to deploy minimally invasive surgical assistance in underserved and decentralized healthcare settings.
Abstract
Robotic laparoscopic surgery has gained increas- ing attention in recent years for its potential to deliver more efficient and precise minimally invasive procedures. However, adoption of surgical robotic platforms remains largely confined to high-resource medical centers, exacerbating healthcare dis- parities in rural and low-resource regions. To close this gap, a range of solutions has been explored, from remote mentorship to fully remote telesurgery. Yet, the practical deployment of surgical robotic systems to underserved communities remains an unsolved challenge. Humanoid systems offer a promising path toward deployability, as they can directly operate in environments designed for humans without extensive infras- tructure modifications – including operating rooms. In this work, we introduce LapSurgie, the first humanoid-robot-based laparoscopic teleoperation framework. The system leverages an inverse-mapping strategy for manual-wristed laparoscopic instruments that abides to remote center-of-motion constraints, enabling precise hand-to-tool control of off-the-shelf surgical laparoscopic tools without additional setup requirements. A control console equipped with a stereo vision system provides real-time visual feedback. Finally, a comprehensive user study across platforms demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provides initial evidence for the feasibility of deploying humanoid robots in laparoscopic procedures.