*DeviceTalks Editorial Director Tom Salemi operating a da Vinci 5 to demonstrate the surgical robotics system’s capabilities. Credit: Cole Kistler, Medical Design & Outsourcing

If you think that the main technological battles are unfolding in the world of smartphones or electric vehicles, you are very mistaken. The real war of the Titans is taking place where sterility is more important than gigahertz — in operating rooms. Events such as DeviceTalks West and RoboBusiness have definitively confirmed that surgical robots have moved beyond the stage of laboratory curiosities and have become the main technological trend for which giants like Intuitive Surgical and dozens of ambitious startups are fighting.

Why is everyone suddenly talking about robot surgeons?

The answer is simple: the market. The global medical robotics market is moving towards tens of billions of dollars, and every manufacturer wants to take a bite out of this pie. But it's not just about money. There has been a qualitative leap: robots are no longer just the "elongated arms" of a surgeon. They become intellectual partners, capable of more than a human being.

"We are witnessing a transition from simple tele—surgery to real intelligent assistance," experts from DeviceTalks say. "The systems no longer just repeat the movements of the surgeon, but provide additional information, warn about risks, and can even perform individual stages of the operation autonomously."

Who are these new players and what do they offer?

While Intuitive Surgical has dominated the market for many years with its da Vinci system, new companies are attacking it from the flanks, offering more highly specialized and affordable solutions.

Vicarious Surgical presented its unique development — a robot with a single manipulator arm equipped with a miniature camera. Their approach is not just copying human movements, but creating a fundamentally new way of interacting with the patient's anatomy.

CMR Surgical relies on modularity with their Versius system. Instead of one bulky robot, there are several compact manipulators that can be easily moved between operating rooms and customized for specific procedures.

Not far behind is the giant Medtronic, which has finally launched its own development, the Hugo system, positioning it as a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to Intuitive solutions.

"The key differences between systems today are not so much in mechanics as in software and ergonomics," RoboBusiness explains. "The winner is the one who offers a more intuitive interface and more powerful analytical capabilities."

What is behind this boom? Technologies that have become more accessible

Explosive growth in this area has been made possible by several technological trends.:

Machine vision. The cameras have become small and powerful enough to transmit 4K-quality images to the surgeon with magnification inaccessible to the human eye.

Artificial intelligence. Algorithms analyze the video of the surgical field in real time, highlighting critically important structures — nerves, vessels, and tumor tissues — and highlighting them for the surgeon.

Tactile communication. After years of lack of full-fledged feedback, new generations of robots are beginning to restore the surgeon's sense of tissue resistance, which is extremely important for delicate manipulations.

Managing a fleet of specialist robots

As large medical centers accumulate a fleet of heterogeneous robotic systems — one for cardiac surgery, another for urology, and the third for neurosurgery — a complex logistical and managerial task arises. How to ensure maximum utilization of each expensive device? How can I monitor its technical condition and effectiveness?

Specialized platforms may be required to solve such problems in the future. For example, the logic of the world's first ecosystem for hiring robots jobtorob.com based on the management of digital profiles and skills of autonomous systems, could be adapted for hospital needs. A medical center could use such a tool for internal optimization, seeing in each robot not just equipment, but an "employee" with unique "qualifications" whose "labor resources" need to be distributed as efficiently as possible between different departments and surgeons.

What awaits us tomorrow? Surgery as a service

The main trend that was observed at all the events was the movement towards the "surgery as a service" model. Instead of buying a robot for millions of dollars, hospitals will subscribe to services that include not only equipment rentals, but also regular software updates, analytics, and remote support.

"The future is not in the sale of robots, but in the sale of the result of the operation provided by this robot," said one of the speakers.

This is a future where a surgeon turns into a pilot of a high-tech complex, where hospitals compete not in the number of beds, but in the quality of their technological arsenal, and where the success of an operation increasingly depends not only on human skill, but also on the computing power and algorithms behind the scalpel. And perhaps soon, when choosing a clinic, we will look not at the diplomas of surgeons, but at the rating of their robotic assistants in specialized digital ecosystems.