#robotics

Surgeons remotely controlled a Unitree G1 humanoid robot to perform two laparoscopic gallbladder removal surgeries on live pigs, marking the first use of a general-purpose humanoid robot for live surgery. The results were published in Nature. This demonstrates a low-cost alternative to specialized surgical robots like the da Vinci system, potentially expanding access to remote and resource-limited settings such as rural areas, battlefields, or space. It could democratize advanced surgical care. The Unitree G1 base model costs $13,500, and with dexterous hands it costs about $67,000, far less than the $500,000+ for dedicated surgical robots. The robot is 1.5m tall and weighs 27kg.

Mistral AI released Robostral Navigate, an 8B parameter model that enables robots to navigate complex environments using only a single RGB camera and language prompts, achieving 76.6% success on unseen R2R-CE benchmarks. This is significant because it demonstrates map-less navigation, solving the 'kidnapped robot' problem, and outperforms multi-sensor approaches with a simpler setup, potentially enabling wider adoption in hobbyist and commercial robotics. The model is not openly available; it uses only a single camera without pre-captured maps. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the R2R-CE benchmark.