Eye Surgery Robot: Cataract Robots and ABB

Cataract surgery is one of the most common operations in the world, and for most of its history it has depended on one pair of steady hands working through a microscope on a lens a few millimetres across. An eye surgery robot changes that by placing a machine between the surgeon's hands and the instruments in the eye. This post follows ophthalmic microsurgery from hand tools to the phaco machine, then to the robots now being tested on patients by Preceyes, Horizon Surgical Systems and ForSight Robotics. It also covers where ABB robots fit today, which is in the factories and labs behind the operating room. For the wider story of robots in surgery, see our post on surgical robots.

Cmdr. Brice Nicholson performs cataract surgery under a Zeiss microscope aboard the hospital ship USNS Mercy in Indonesia, 2012. Photo: Michael Feddersen / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How cataract surgeons worked by hand

Eye surgery has always been close work done with small, hand held tools. Before cataracts were removed through tiny incisions, surgeons pushed the clouded lens out of the line of sight, a method called couching, and later learned to lift the whole lens out of the eye. Plenty of eye operations still look like the 1986 strabismus case in the photo below, with forceps, scissors and sutures guided by eye and a speculum holding the lids open. Every movement came from the surgeon's fingers, so hand tremor, fatigue and the limits of human depth perception set the limits of what could be done safely inside an eye.

Strabismus surgery in 1986: forceps and scissors detach an eye muscle while a speculum holds the lids open. Photo: Bticho / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The artificial lens came out of the Second World War. Harold Ridley, a surgeon in London, treated Royal Air Force pilots with splinters of acrylic plastic from their cockpit canopies in their eyes and noticed that the plastic did not set off the inflammation that glass splinters did. One of those pilots was Squadron Leader Gordon "Mouse" Cleaver of 601 Squadron. On 29 November 1949, at St Thomas' Hospital, Ridley implanted the first intraocular lens made from that kind of acrylic, and on 8 February 1950 he left one permanently in place. A plaque at the hospital records that second date.

The plaque at St Thomas' Hospital in London marking Harold Ridley's first intraocular lens. Photo: Davidruben / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The next big change was a machine. In 1967 Charles Kelman and Anton Banko introduced phacoemulsification. Kelman got the idea from the ultrasonic probe his dentist used, and Banko designed the first device. The phaco handpiece breaks the cloudy lens up with ultrasound and sucks out the pieces through a small cut, so the patient no longer needs a long hospital stay and cataract surgery became an outpatient procedure. The surgeon still held every instrument, though. Phaco machines control power, fluid and suction, while the position of the tip inside the eye still comes from a human hand.

A surgeon at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth inserts a synthetic lens after removing a cataract, 2003. Photo: Sarah Langdon / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots enter the eye and the clinic

The first robot to operate inside a human eye came from the Netherlands. Preceyes, a spin off from Eindhoven University of Technology, built a remotely controlled arm with seven motors that filters out hand tremor and scales large joystick moves down to tiny ones. If the surgeon lets go, the robot freezes in place. On 31 August 2016 Professor Robert MacLaren used it at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to peel a membrane about a hundredth of a millimetre thick off the retina of William Beaver's right eye. That first case was retinal surgery, and cataract robots followed years later.

Cataract surgery at a hospital in Bedele, Ethiopia, with the surgeon at the operating microscope. Photo: Counthaku / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Two companies are now testing robots on the cataract itself. Horizon Surgical Systems, founded in 2021 by UCLA faculty members including Jean Pierre Hubschman and Tsu Chin Tsao, announced in October 2025 that 10 patients had cataract surgery with its Polaris robot with no adverse events. Israel's ForSight Robotics, which raised 125 million dollars in June 2025, reported on 7 August 2026 that its JASPER platform had completed 26 cataract operations in a first in human study led by Robert Ang of the Asian Eye Institute in Manila. None had to be finished by hand, patients had only topical anaesthesia or mild sedation, and all went home the same day.

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

ABB does not build eye surgery robots, and nothing in these trials uses ABB arms. Where ABB robots do appear is in the work behind ophthalmic care. A single arm YuMi IRB 14050 applies glue to a small sensor part on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki, and the IRB 1300 comes in a Clean Room version for sterile production. Lenses, cartridges and surgical kits for cataract surgery could be assembled, inspected and packed by cells like these, which is a possibility rather than a named project. Our post on medical device manufacturing covers how such lines are set up.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot handling trays in an enclosed cell. Photo: ABB

What eye surgery robots still have to prove

The case for robots in eye surgery rests on a shortage of surgeons. ForSight cites research forecasting a 12 percent drop in the number of ophthalmologists by 2035 while demand rises by 24 percent. The field is also widening past cataracts. In August 2026 Sony Computer Science Laboratories reported an origami inspired surgical robot that performed a subretinal injection in an animal model, the kind of procedure gene therapies for retinal disease need. For patients, the main hope is shorter waiting lists and specialist level care at smaller clinics, closer to home.

Corneal cross linking for keratoconus at Belvoir Hospital, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 2016, the first at a US military hospital. Photo: Reese Brown / DVIDS via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Regulation and payment are the next hurdles. On 8 October 2026, during the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting in New Orleans, Medevise Consulting is hosting a workshop on robotics in ophthalmology where Horizon's CEO Hubschman speaks alongside a former FDA director and a reimbursement consultant. The agenda covers FDA and EU approval, payment for robotic procedures and virtual reality training for surgeons. Hospitals will want to know who pays for the robot on top of the surgeon's time. ABB's healthcare research hub in Houston, opened in 2019, works on hospital lab automation with GoFa and YuMi.

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

For factories that make eye care products, the path is easier to plan than it is for the operating room. A cell that packs lenses or tests instruments can be laid out and tested first in RobotStudio before any hardware arrives, and cobots like GoFa can share a bench with staff in a clean area. Inside the eye, the open problems remain cost per procedure, proof of safety over thousands of cases, and training surgeons who will spend more time at a console. If the current trials hold up, the next few years will show whether robotic cataract surgery becomes routine or stays in a handful of specialist centres.

An ABB GoFa cobot working with lab instruments at the SLAS lab automation conference. Photo: ABB

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