A surgeon at a console, arms inside the patient
A teleoperated surgical robot, the kind of system made famous by platforms like da Vinci, is built around a clear division of labor. The surgeon sits at a console, away from the operating table, and manipulates handles that track the position and orientation of their hands. Those movements are captured, processed, and sent to a set of robotic arms positioned over the patient. The arms hold wristed instruments, small tools with an extra joint near the tip that lets them articulate inside the body in ways a human wrist pushed through a narrow port simply cannot. A separate arm holds an endoscopic camera, giving the surgeon a magnified, stable, 3D view of the surgical site on a display at the console.
This is not autonomy, it's a very sophisticated remote control system, and that distinction matters enormously. Every meaningful motion of the instrument tip originates from a deliberate human hand movement. The robot's job is to faithfully, precisely, and safely reproduce that movement at a different scale and through a different mechanical structure, not to decide what motion should happen next. The arms themselves are typically designed around a remote center of motion, a fixed pivot point at the incision site, so that no matter how the surgeon moves the instrument tip inside the patient, the arm doesn't lever against or enlarge the small port it entered through.