Watching old episodes of ER won't make you a doctor, but watching videos may be all the training a robotic surgeon's AI brain needs to sew you up after a procedure. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University have published a new paper showing off a surgical robot as capable as a human in carrying out some procedures after simply watching humans do so.
The research team tested their idea with the popular da Vinci Surgical System, which is often used for non-invasive surgery. Programming robots usually requires manually inputting every movement that you want them to make. The researchers bypassed this using imitation learning, a technique that implanted human-level surgical skills in the robots by letting them observe how humans do it.
