Brain Implant Robot: From Horsley's Frame to ABB

A brain implant robot places electrodes into living brain tissue, often thread by thread, at a scale of micrometres. This post follows how surgeons learned to aim at points deep inside the skull, starting with a metal frame built for animal research in 1908, then the first robots that steered needles for neurosurgeons, and finally the machines that now sew hair thin threads into the brain for brain computer interfaces. Along the way we look at what this means for patients at home and where ABB robots, which do not operate on people, already work in the medical supply chain.

Neuralink's surgical robot on display at the company's demonstration event in 2020. Photo: Leijurv / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How metal frames taught surgeons to aim inside the skull

The idea of aiming at a point in the brain by coordinates came from Britain. In 1908 Victor Horsley, a neurosurgeon, and Robert H. Clarke, a physiologist, published an apparatus that fixed an animal's head in a frame and used a Cartesian grid to guide an electrode to a chosen spot. It was built for brain research, and there is no evidence it was ever used in human surgery. Modern brain implant robots still work from the same two things: a fixed reference on the head and measured coordinates.

Portrait of physiologist Robert Henry Clarke, who designed the stereotactic instrument with Victor Horsley. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Human surgery followed in 1947. At Temple University in Philadelphia, Ernest Spiegel and Henry Wycis published a frame similar to the Horsley and Clarke apparatus, and theirs was the first used for brain operations. They also produced the first atlas of the human brain based on landmarks inside the skull. In 1949 Lars Leksell in Sweden published a frame that used polar coordinates, and two years later he used it to aim radiation into the brain. CT and MRI later made these frames far more precise.

A frame for stereotactic thalamotomy on display at the Glenside Museum in Bristol. Photo: Rodw / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots joined the operating room in 1985, when a Unimation PUMA industrial arm held and oriented a needle for a brain biopsy under CT guidance. It was one of the earliest uses of a robot in surgery. A different line of work produced the first implants for reading the brain: the Utah array, a sensor with 100 hair thin electrodes, became the heart of the BrainGate trials that began in 2004 at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University, where people with paralysis moved a computer cursor by thought.

A dummy BrainGate interface shown at the Boston Museum of Science in 2005. Photo: PaulWicks / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots that place electrodes in current brain implant trials

Most deep brain work is still done with a frame. In a stereotactic biopsy, the frame fixed to the patient's head keeps the needle on the planned axis to within about a millimetre. Stereotactic robots now do the aiming for many of these jobs. Renishaw's neuromate is used for deep brain stimulation, SEEG electrodes, biopsies and neuroendoscopy, and ROSA, developed by the French company Medtech and later bought by Zimmer Biomet, does similar work. A neurosurgeon quoted by Renishaw says the robot lets him plan trajectories that were impossible with a standard frame.

Surgeons in Lausanne take a brain biopsy through a stereotactic frame fixed to the patient's head. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Neuralink took the next step with a robot that does the implanting itself. Its R1 robot pushes a tungsten rhenium needle 25 micrometres wide to insert up to six flexible threads, 192 electrodes, per minute, with built in imaging to guide each insertion. The FDA approved human trials in May 2023, and the first patient, Noland Arbaugh, was implanted in January 2024. In September 2026 Neuralink showed Terry, the third participant in its VOICE trial, using about 3,000 recording channels in his speech motor area to say "I love you" to his wife by thought.

Noland Arbaugh, the first person to receive a Neuralink implant, in 2025. Photo: Rational Optimist Society / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Europe is working on its own approach. On 1 September 2026 Fraunhofer IZM described the MINIGRAPH implant, a flexible graphene device with 256 recording and 32 stimulating electrodes for treating Parkinson's disease, placed with a robot supported procedure through a single small opening in the skull. The EU funded project ran from October 2022 to June 2026 and was coordinated by the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. In October, INBRAIN Neuroelectronics and the MINIGRAPH partners reported magnetically guided robotic implantation of these thin implants. ABB robots are not part of any of this surgery, but single arm YuMi cells already assemble medical devices, such as on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki.

A single arm YuMi IRB 14050 in its cell on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

What brain implant robots need before they reach more patients

Patients in these trials hope to speak again, use a phone or a wheelchair by thought, or calm a Parkinson's tremor with a smaller implant. The near future is more trials and longer follow up. Neuralink's Blindsight project, aimed at restoring some vision to blind people, received breakthrough device status from the FDA in September 2024. Neuralink reported 12 trial participants by September 2025, and each new patient tests whether threads stay in place and keep working for years. Removing or replacing an implant safely is still one of the questions regulators asked about before the first trials.

A man fitted with a stereotactic head frame while being prepared for deep brain stimulation surgery. Photo: Whoisjohngalt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

If these implants reach more patients, someone has to make them in volume. Graphene electrodes on polyimide films, tiny chips and sealed housings all have to be made cleanly and checked one by one. That is work where small, accurate robots such as ABB's YuMi already fit, and lab automation cells, like ABB's mobile YuMi concept for hospital labs, show how robots could handle samples and parts around a clinic. Readers who want the wider story can start with our post on surgical robots.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading test tubes into a centrifuge. Photo: ABB

Implants and surgery are expensive, and only a small number of centres do this work. Safety covers more than the operation: infection, long term tissue reaction, and the question The Conversation raised in September, what happens to patients after a trial ends. Surgeons also need training on robots that change quickly, and engineers who build such systems usually test them in simulation first, the way industrial cells are tried in RobotStudio before anyone touches real hardware.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

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