Why these systems are teleoperated, and fail-safe by design
Medical robots operate in a context where the cost of a wrong or unintended motion is uniquely high and often irreversible, a robot arm in a warehouse that makes a small positioning error can usually just retry, tissue that's been cut or damaged cannot. This is a central reason surgical robots today remain teleoperated rather than autonomous: a human surgeon, with full clinical judgment, situational awareness, and legal and ethical accountability, stays in the loop making every consequential decision, while the robot's job is constrained to faithfully and safely executing the motion that surgeon commands. The system is designed to fail safe, meaning that if any fault is detected, whether a sensor disagreement, a software error, or a communication glitch between console and arms, the default response is to freeze motion or disengage the arms entirely, rather than to guess at a safe continuation.
This fail-safe posture shapes the whole system design. Motion only happens while the surgeon is actively and continuously engaged with the controls, if the surgeon's hands leave the controls or their head moves away from the console viewer, the instruments stop moving immediately. Software watchdogs continuously check that commanded motion, sensed motion, and expected motion all agree within tight tolerances, and any mismatch halts the system rather than attempting to correct itself autonomously mid-procedure. This is a deliberate contrast with domains like industrial automation, where recovering automatically from a fault and continuing is often the goal, in surgery, stopping safely is almost always preferable to continuing on a best guess.