Robotic Telesurgery: From Lindbergh to 5G and ABB

A surgeon sits at a console, moves two hand controls and watches a 3D screen. The robot that copies those movements may be in the next room, or in another country. That setup is called robotic telesurgery. In September 2026 it was back in the news after a test between Delhi and Chengdu and West Africa's first remote operation, in Nigeria. This post follows robotic telesurgery from the first transatlantic operation in 2001, through the Canadian trials and 5G links, to this autumn's cross-border tests. We also look at where ABB robots work in the hospitals around these operations, and at what still stands in the way of wider use.

A visitor sits at a da Vinci surgeon console at the Cambridge Science Festival, 2015. Photo: Cmglee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How the Lindbergh operation put an ocean between surgeon and patient

Before robots, keyhole surgery already put a screen between the surgeon and the patient. In a laparoscopic operation the surgeon works through small cuts with long instruments and watches a camera image on a monitor. Removing a gallbladder this way became routine in the 1990s. The surgeon still had to stand at the table, though. In the early 1990s SRI International worked on telepresence surgery with US military funding, aiming to let a surgeon operate on a wounded soldier from a safe distance. Intuitive Surgical later licensed that work, and it fed into the da Vinci system.

US Air Force surgeons perform laparoscopic stomach surgery while watching the camera image on a monitor, 2005. Photo: Samuel Bendet, US Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first long-distance human operation came on 7 September 2001. Jacques Marescaux, a French surgeon, sat in New York and removed the gallbladder of a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, about 6,230 km away. He used a modified Zeus robot from Computer Motion, linked over redundant fibre-optic lines from France Telecom. The team had tested the full setup in July 2001. The press called it the Lindbergh operation, after the pilot who first flew the Atlantic alone. The operation worked, but a dedicated transatlantic link cost far too much for everyday use.

Jacques Marescaux, the surgeon who led the Lindbergh operation in 2001, photographed in 2014. Photo: Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Canada tried a cheaper route. Mehran Anvari, a laparoscopic surgeon in Hamilton, Ontario, operated remotely on patients in North Bay, about 400 km away. His team later moved to Bell Canada's ordinary network and carried out more than 20 complex laparoscopic operations between the two cities. Telesurgery suites like the one in North Bay paired a robot at the patient's side with a local surgical team ready to take over. Then Computer Motion merged with Intuitive in 2003, the Zeus was dropped, and telesurgery went quiet for most of a decade.

The patient side of the telesurgery suite in North Bay, Ontario, with the robot draped beside the table. Photo: Trevorjchapman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Telesurgery in 2026: Delhi, Chengdu and Abuja

Faster networks and a new group of robot makers revived the idea. Wikipedia's account of remote surgery lists a lung tumour operation over a 5G connection from about 5,000 km away in China in 2024, and a bariatric operation between Strasbourg and Indore, more than 8,500 km apart, in July 2025. Systems such as SS Innovations' SSi Mantra from India, Toumai and BORNS from China, and the da Vinci 5 from Intuitive now come with remote operation either built in or planned. In September 2026 alone, hospitals in India, Nigeria and the Philippines reported long-distance procedures.

Surgeons work the hand controls at the consoles of a telesurgery suite, 2018. Photo: Trevorjchapman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Two September cases show the range. On 25 September 2026 a team at Max Super Speciality Hospital in Vaishali, Delhi, led by Dr Vivek Bindal, controlled a BORNS robotic system in Chengdu, China, nearly 5,000 km away. It was a pre-clinical test on animal models, covering gallbladder removal, a hysterectomy and kidney procedures, and the hospital said plainly it was not routine clinical use. A few days earlier, Redeemer's Health Village in Mowe, Ogun State, said its surgeons had removed a kidney from a patient at Nisa Premier Hospital in Abuja, about 500 km away, over an internet link.

Workers climb a mobile network tower, the kind of link that remote surgery now runs over. Photo: Olgierd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

None of these systems are ABB machines, and ABB does not make surgical robots. Its robots show up elsewhere in the hospital. In 2019 it opened a healthcare research hub at the Texas Medical Center in Houston to develop robots for medical labs, and it has shown a mobile YuMi concept that loads centrifuges and moves samples. Cobots such as the GoFa CRB 15000 and the single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 already handle tubes and pipettes in labs, as our post on hospital lab automation explains. A remote operation still depends on quick lab results and on sterile instruments arriving on time.

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

What remote surgery still needs to solve

Over the next few years, telesurgery will probably grow first as a mentoring tool. Dr Bindal said remote proctoring, where an expert guides or takes over part of a case from far away, may come before routine remote operations. For patients in smaller towns the hope is shorter journeys, with a local team and a robot at the bedside and a specialist on the other end of the link. Marescaux's Strasbourg institute, IRCAD, still trains surgeons from around the world in this kind of work.

The IRCAD building in Strasbourg, the surgical training institute founded by Jacques Marescaux. Photo: Pierre Rudloff / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Most of the open problems sit outside the robot itself. Every hand movement and every video frame has to cross the network with almost no delay, and the link needs a backup when it drops. Regulators have to decide who is responsible when the surgeon is in one country and the patient in another, and which licence applies. The robots are costly, and a local team still has to be trained to set up the robot, change instruments and take over if the connection fails.

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

Factories have dealt with some of the same questions. Industrial robots are programmed and checked in simulation tools like RobotStudio before they run, they use safety functions such as SafeMove to limit speed and reach, and they are watched and serviced from a distance. Those ideas carry over to hospital automation, where ABB arms like the YuMi and GoFa could keep labs and supply rooms running around the clock. We have found no sign that ABB plans a surgical robot, so for now its part in telesurgery is the lab and supply work around the operating room.

ABB YuMi working at a bench beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

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