Medical & Surgical Robotics
This is course 1 of the Specialized Robotics Applications track, which takes the kinematics, control, actuator, and perception fundamentals covered elsewhere on this site and applies them to a domain where the stakes are as high as they get: operating inside a human body. We look at how teleoperated surgical systems translate a surgeon's hand movements into precise instrument motion, why motion scaling and tremor filtering exist, what makes force feedback so difficult to deliver well, why medical robots are engineered around redundancy and hard limits rather than clever autonomy, and where autonomous assistance is and isn't actually appearing in operating rooms and clinics today. It assumes you're comfortable with general kinematics, control loops, and actuator/sensor basics, and focuses entirely on what changes when you apply those ideas to surgery and rehabilitation.
