Autonomy, not the console

The question

«6 в 1» asked whether the atlas has the da Vinci surgical robot. It does not, and not by accident. On 20 September the robotics package refused it: every motion of a da Vinci is made by a surgeon at the console. A count of such operations shows how far surgery spread, not how far the machine’s autonomy went.

What went in instead

What the atlas lacked was autonomous surgery itself. It now has three records, all from one line of work, Axel Krieger’s. In 2016 the robot STAR sutured the intestine of living pigs in open surgery by itself while the surgeon only supervised. In 2022 STAR did the same laparoscopically: the surgeon chose and approved the plan, and the robot placed the stitches. In 2025 the system SRT-H, trained on 16,000 recorded demonstration trajectories, clipped and cut the duct and artery on eight gallbladders outside the body, all eight times without a person.

da Vinci did arrive, as a name inside the records. STAR was compared with it in 2016 and came out ahead on even stitch spacing. SRT-H runs on a research version of the same robot: the machine a surgeon steers in the clinic here moves by a trained program.

What turned up on the way

The 2025 release says the robot «learned from surgery videos» and took voice commands. The article says otherwise: it learned from demonstrations recorded on the same robot, and it gives itself corrections in plain language from its own upper level. Human voice corrections appear only in the training data. The record follows the article. MicroPort’s claim of an autonomous operation on a live pig in December 2025 did not enter: there is no peer-reviewed paper on it.