Dream, Courage and Challenge

Standing at the beginning of the New Year 2019, we have a lot of feelings in reviewing the exploration and development of the robotic surgical system. In the past 30 years, AESOP, Zeus, da Vinci, MiroSurge, DLR, Raven, ALF-X, MicroHand and many other outstanding systems have been presented as the products of human wisdom (Tan et al. In Surg Endosc 30:4330–4352, 2016). What drives us to keep on exploring and where is our future going?