SurgVIL: Scaling Surgical Robot Imitation Learning with Open-source Surgical Videos

Learning-based surgical robot autonomy requires large-scale demonstrations with synchronized videos and robot actions, but such data are exceedingly rare in clinical or realistic tissue settings because robot kinematics are typically inaccessible outside controlled research systems. In contrast, phantom data collected on research platforms provide accurate action labels but lack the visual diversity of real tissue. We propose SurgVIL, a framework for scaling surgical robot imitation learning using open-source surgical videos. SurgVIL combines kinematically labeled phantom robot demonstrations with surgical videos from open-source datasets and online sources for policy learning. Since these videos lack robot motion labels, we estimate approximate kinematics as weak supervision. We evaluate SurgVIL on two da Vinci robot tasks: needle pick-up and cholecystectomy cutting. Across ACT, $π_0$, and GR00T-H backbones, adding surgical videos substantially improves generalization to real-tissue and out-of-distribution settings, suggesting a scalable path from phantom training toward generalizable surgical robot policies.

Open-H-Embodiment: A Large-Scale Dataset for Enabling Foundation Models in Medical Robotics

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

SRT-H: A Hierarchical Framework for Autonomous Surgery via Language Conditioned Imitation Learning

Research on autonomous robotic surgery has largely focused on simple task automation in controlled environments. However, real-world surgical applications require dexterous manipulation over extended time scales while demanding generalization across diverse variations in human tissue. These challenges remain difficult to address using existing logic-based or conventional end-to-end learning strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose a hierarchical framework for dexterous, long-horizon surgical tasks. Our method employs a high-level policy for task planning and a low-level policy for generating task-space controls for the surgical robot. The high-level planner plans tasks using language, producing task-specific or corrective instructions that guide the robot at a coarse level. Leveraging language as a planning modality offers an intuitive and generalizable interface, mirroring how experienced surgeons instruct traineers during procedures. We validate our framework in ex-vivo experiments on a complex minimally invasive procedure, cholecystectomy, and conduct ablative studies to assess key design choices. Our approach achieves a 100% success rate across n=8 different ex-vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention. The hierarchical approach greatly improves the policy's ability to recover from suboptimal states that are inevitable in the highly dynamic environment of realistic surgical applications. This work represents the first demonstration of step-level autonomy, marking a critical milestone toward autonomous surgical systems for clinical studies. By advancing generalizable autonomy in surgical robotics, our approach brings the field closer to real-world deployment.