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On 15 September 2015 at 22:56, Grimmund <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

It is my impression that robot surgery is usually to minimize the invasiveness of the surgery, or is more properly a variant of surgical waldos, where the surgeon is doing microsurgery and using the robot as set of micro waldos.

Not so much that the surgery is being done by the robot (and the robot is doing the surgery autonomously) but that the surgery is being done by telepresence and the "robot" is nothing more than a set of waldoes.

Which doesn't mean surgical waldos are not a cool thing, but that they aren't really "robots" any more than my r/c truck is a robot. It's being operated by a human and the mechanism itself has no autonomy.

You are absolutely correct, it is not a "robot" in the sense we use the word in most SF contexts. It is however, very much a "physitar" in the sense that JimV described it and, in my opinion, much more likely to be the way of the future than a local doctor in a slave suit.

Nonetheless, in the medical context, that is what "robotic surgery" is. I recall my disappointment when I discovered that all these new-fangled "drones" (a term that for me had always implied multiple independently-mobile devices controlled by a single (semi-) autonomous computer) were just good old-fashioned "remote control" vehicles.