Veterinary Robot: From Horse Doctors to ABB Arms

The veterinary robot already exists in a few places. Some vets operate on dogs with surgical robots built for people, and at least one horse hospital scans standing horses with robot arms that carry ABB parts. This post starts with village horse healers and the first vet schools, then looks at the robots and lab machines in animal hospitals today. The last part covers where the technology could go next, in small pet clinics and in the diagnostic labs behind them, and what still stands in the way: cost, instruments sized for humans, safety rules and training.

An army veterinarian operates on a dog at the clinic of the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms, California. Photo: U.S. Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From horse healers to Bourgelat's school in Lyon

For most of history, animal medicine meant horses and cattle, and the people who treated them learned on the job. Farriers looked after hooves, and travelling horse healers sold their cures from farm to farm. In 1890 the photographer Yakov Leuzinger took a group portrait of these men in the Mezen district of Arkhangelsk, in northern Russia: professional horsemen who worked as healers, trainers and stablemen, posing with the bags and gear of their trade. None of them needed a licence, and there was no school where they could have earned one.

Professional horsemen, healers and stablemen from the Mezen district of Arkhangelsk, Russia, in 1890. Photo: Yakov Leuzinger via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Formal training began in France. Claude Bourgelat, a Lyon lawyer who became head of the city's riding academy in 1740, founded the world's first veterinary school in Lyon in 1761 and a second one at Alfort, near Paris, in 1765. He had a practical reason. Cattle plague was killing herds, and students trained in Lyon were credited with helping to fight it. London followed in 1791, when a group led by Granville Penn set up the Veterinary College of London, now the Royal Veterinary College. Horses were still the main patients.

The VetAgro Sup campus at Marcy l'Etoile, today's home of the Lyon veterinary school Bourgelat founded in 1761. Photo: Xavier Caré / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In the twentieth century cars and tractors pushed the horse aside, and dogs and cats moved to the centre of the profession. A photograph from around 1920 shows two vets in white coats operating at a dog and cat hospital in Seattle, in a room that looks a lot like a small human clinic of the period. Robots arrived much later, and they were borrowed from human medicine. A Brazilian study reported two dog spays done with AESOP, a voice-controlled arm designed to hold the camera during keyhole surgery.

Two veterinarians operate at the Seattle Dog and Cat Hospital around 1920. Photo: Webster and Stevens / MOHAI via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots in vet clinics and horse hospitals today

Intuitive's da Vinci, the best-known surgical robot, has started to reach vet schools. In 2022 a Texas A&M faculty member was among the first veterinarians to train on it, in France. At Cornell, surgeon Nicole Buote got a pre-owned da Vinci Si-e from R2 Surgical. In November 2023 her team did its first robotic gastropexy on a live dog, a Great Dane called Finley from a local shelter. Gastropexy stitches the stomach to the body wall so it cannot twist, which is a deadly risk in large breeds. Cornell is now trying the robot on foal cadavers for cleft palate repair.

A da Vinci Xi surgical robot in a hospital, a newer model of the da Vinci family Cornell uses for dog surgery. Photo: Alvarogarciamd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Industrial robots come in with horses. In spring 2016 Penn Vet's New Bolton Center unveiled Equimagine, an imaging system from the New York company 4DDI built with components from ABB. Two large robot arms move the scanner around a lightly sedated horse that stays on its feet, and a scan takes less than a minute. A conventional CT needs general anaesthesia with the horse lying on its side. Medical director Barbara Dallap Schaer called robotic CT "much less stressful". This autumn Virginia Tech reported a horse named Pea as the first to test focused ultrasound on skin tumours called sarcoids.

Laboratory analysers and a computer on the counter of a veterinary clinic in Newark, New Jersey. Photo: Veterinarian Pet Alliance / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A lot of the change happens in the lab, where owners never look. Many vet clinics now keep their own blood analysers on the counter and send the rest to big reference labs. In September IDEXX said it had bought CoVetAI to build what it calls workflow intelligence for clinics. ABB has not announced a vet lab project. Its dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 has, however, been shown loading test tubes into a centrifuge in a mobile lab concept for hospitals, developed at ABB's healthcare research hub in Houston. Uncapping, sorting and loading samples is also the daily work of a vet diagnostic lab, so this is a realistic possibility.

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

What the next veterinary robot could do

The next steps will probably show up first in referral hospitals and university clinics, which already own CT scanners and full operating theatres. Used surgical robots like the one Cornell received make the cost easier to justify. More horse hospitals may want standing imaging, because anaesthesia carries its own risk for a large animal. In the lab, a cobot such as the GoFa CRB 15000 or a YuMi could take over sample handling. Engineers would normally build and test a cell like that in RobotStudio before it touches a real sample.

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

For pets at home and in small clinics, rehabilitation is the obvious target. Dogs already recover from joint surgery on underwater treadmills and in hydrotherapy pools, with a therapist in the water guiding each step. A robot that holds a harness, measures gait or repeats an exercise set makes sense on paper, but we found no product that does this for animals yet. Proving that such a device helps would take time, and an animal cannot say when something hurts. A related post covers how ABB robots already help in pet care and pet food.

A dog in a life vest exercises in water with a therapist at an animal physical therapy practice. Photo: MAJic2288 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Several problems remain. A surgical robot is a large purchase for a vet practice, and animal owners mostly pay out of pocket. Instruments sized for people do not always fit a cat or a small dog. Safety rules for robots around patients were written with humans in mind, and vets have little spare time for training. For now ABB's part is the arms and the lab automation behind the scenes, while surgeons keep the scalpel. Equimagine suggests that is a sensible place to start: a sturdy industrial robot doing a precise, repeatable job around a large and nervous animal.

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

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