Why surgeons want to feel what the instrument touches
In open or manual laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon's hands feel the resistance of tissue, the give of a suture pulling taut, the firmness of a knot. That force information is a genuine surgical signal, it helps a surgeon judge how much tension is safe, whether a needle has fully passed through tissue, or whether an instrument is pressing against something it shouldn't. In a teleoperated system, the surgeon's hands are at a console, physically disconnected from the instrument tip, so none of that force information reaches them for free. If the system provides nothing back, the surgeon is operating on vision alone, judging force indirectly from how tissue visibly deforms, which is a real skill surgeons develop but is a poorer substitute for direct feel.
Force, or haptic, feedback tries to close this gap by measuring the force the instrument experiences at the tip and reproducing a proportional resistance at the surgeon's hand controls. Done well, it lets the surgeon feel a suture tighten or feel an instrument meet resistance, the same way they would with their own hands directly on the tissue. This is why haptic feedback is considered one of the more valuable capabilities a surgical robot could offer, and also why its absence or limitation in many current systems is a genuine, acknowledged tradeoff rather than an oversight.