Key Technologies for Medical Robots

Medical robotics has become one of the international frontier research hotspots, which is the product of combining traditional medical devices with information technology and robotics from the perspective of life science and engineering theories, methods and tools, and is an emerging research field with many interdisciplinary disciplines (Ni et al., J Mech Eng 51(13):45–52, 2015). Justin Weir, a urologist at the Imperial College London believes that robots are now an integral part of everyday medical work, and as they become less expensive and smaller, they are bound to become routine medical treatments. The key technologies for medical robots include four components: remote surgery technology, surgical navigationSurgical navigation technology, human–machine interaction technology, and assisted interventional therapy.