Robotic Ultrasound: From Glasgow Probes to ABB Cobots

An ultrasound scan depends on the person holding the probe. They choose where to press, how hard and at what angle, and they read the picture as they go. Robotic ultrasound hands some of that work to a machine: an arm that holds the probe for a specialist working from another city, or one that runs a standard scan on its own. This post follows the probe from Ian Donald's work in Glasgow in the 1950s to the French tele-echography robots, then looks at an autonomous joint scanner cleared by the FDA in August 2026 and asks where an ABB cobot such as GoFa could fit.

A Navy hospital corpsman scans a sailor's abdomen with a hand-held probe aboard USS Harry S. Truman, 2006. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How ultrasound went from a hand-held probe to a remote one

In Glasgow in the 1950s, obstetrician Ian Donald worked with John MacVicar, a registrar at the Western Infirmary, and Tom Brown, an engineer at the instrument maker Kelvin & Hughes. On 7 June 1958 the three published "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound" in The Lancet, a paper that included the first published ultrasound image of a fetus. Western Infirmary clinicians and Kelvin Hughes engineers went on to build the Diasonograph in 1963, described as the first obstetric ultrasound machine, and a prototype became the basis for commercial production in 1965.

The Western Infirmary in Glasgow in 2016, the hospital whose clinicians worked with Kelvin Hughes on early ultrasound scanners. Photo: Graeme Yuill / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From then on scanning stayed a manual skill. A sonographer holds the probe against the skin, moves it in small sweeps and adjusts pressure while watching the screen, so the quality of the scan depends heavily on training and practice. That is a problem for rural towns, ships and remote stations with no specialist on hand. Researchers in France began building robots to hold the probe in the late 1990s. In 1999 the LIRMM laboratory in Montpellier described Hippocrate, a six axis jointed arm designed for safety and used on carotid and femoral arteries, and Gourdon and colleagues described SYRTECH, a three axis robot that a sonographer steered with a joystick.

Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka performs an ultrasound exam on astronaut Michael Fincke aboard the International Space Station, 2004. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A group at the University of Orleans, now the PRISME laboratory, built a whole series of these robots. Its later systems included TERESA, built with the European Space Agency, and OTELO, an EU project that ran from 2002 to 2004 and built a light robot that sits on the patient while a specialist far away steers it. These designs led to MELODY, sold by the French company AdEchoTech, one of the first telerobotic ultrasound systems on the market. By the mid 2010s researchers were also mounting probes on general purpose collaborative arms, such as the Universal Robots UR5 at King's College London in 2016 and a KUKA arm at the University of Maryland in 2019.

Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide scans his own leg with an ultrasound device on the space station, 2021. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Autonomous scans and AI guided probes in 2026

The newest systems scan on their own. On 26 August 2026 the Danish company ROPCA received FDA 510(k) clearance for ARTHUR, an arthritis ultrasound robot that captures images of finger, hand and wrist joints automatically under the supervision of a healthcare professional, and for DIANA, software that analyses the images and helps write the report. ARTHUR has been CE marked since 2022 and, according to ROPCA, has done more than 5,400 scans covering 83,500 joints in six European countries. The company points to a shortage of rheumatologists as the reason for automating a scan that follows the same pattern every time.

A portable ultrasound scanner on a wheeled cart, with its probes in holders on top. Photo: Dr Bowser / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ultrasound robots are also moving into treatment. In September 2026 the Sixth Medical Center of the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing reported closing a congenital heart defect in a 48 year old man through a catheter, with an AI driven ultrasound robot that acquired the images, located the defect and gave real time navigation during the procedure. On 1 October 2026 Mendaera said its Focalist system, a handheld robot that guides needles under ultrasound, now works with Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip probes. Both cases use the robot to place the probe or the needle precisely while a doctor stays in charge.

A Navy doctor teaches corpsmen to find veins with an ultrasound machine during an exercise in Norway, 2018. Photo: Sgt. Bethanie Sahms / U.S. Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB does not sell an ultrasound robot, and none of these systems is built on an ABB arm. The research with UR5 and KUKA arms shows that a general collaborative arm can hold a probe, so an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 is a possibility. GoFa carries up to 5 kg, which covers a probe and a force sensor, and it has torque sensors in all six joints so it can feel contact and stop. ABB already tests GoFa for hospital work at its healthcare research hub, mainly for laboratory automation. SafeMove could cap the arm's speed and keep it inside a defined zone above the patient.

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

Where robot held probes go next

In clinics, the first wide use is likely to be scans that follow a fixed routine, like ARTHUR's joint scans, where a robot gives the same angle and pressure every time and a specialist reviews the images later. Remote scanning will matter most where sonographers are scarce, in small hospitals and isolated communities. Home use is further off. A probe on a home robot arm would need a clinician on the other end of a reliable connection and a patient able to lie still in the right position, and regulators would treat the whole setup as a medical device.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Safety and force are the hardest parts. A probe has to press firmly enough for a clear image without hurting the patient, and the arm must stop at once if the patient moves or coughs. Cost is another barrier: a robot cart adds a second expensive machine next to the scanner, and hospitals will pay only if it saves specialist time. People are still needed to set the patient up, check the images and take over the cases the robot cannot handle. Programs for any arm in such a cell would be tested first in simulation, as with RobotStudio.

Programming a GoFa cobot from the FlexPendant touch screen. Photo: ABB

The wider medical robot picture helps here. Surgical robots took decades to move from research arms to routine use, as our post on surgical robot history shows, and robotic ultrasound looks set for a similar path: remote systems came first, and autonomous scans of single body parts such as the hand are arriving now. Scanners have shrunk to laptop carts and handheld probes, which makes them easier for a robot to carry. Whether an industrial cobot maker such as ABB enters this market, or keeps supplying arms for hospital labs, is still an open question.

Sailors run an ultrasound exam in the radiology suite of the hospital ship USNS Mercy, Los Angeles, 2020. Photo: Navy Medicine via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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