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.

Learning Rhythmic Trajectories with Geometric Constraints for Laser-Based Skincare Procedures

The increasing deployment of robots has significantly enhanced the automation levels across a wide and diverse range of industries. This paper investigates the automation challenges of laser-based dermatology procedures in the beauty industry; This group of related manipulation tasks involves delivering energy from a cosmetic laser onto the skin with repetitive patterns. To automate this procedure, we propose to use a robotic manipulator and endow it with the dexterity of a skilled dermatology practitioner through a learning-from-demonstration framework. To ensure that the cosmetic laser can properly deliver the energy onto the skin surface of an individual, we develop a novel structured prediction-based imitation learning algorithm with the merit of handling geometric constraints. Notably, our proposed algorithm effectively tackles the imitation challenges associated with quasi-periodic motions, a common feature of many laser-based cosmetic tasks. The conducted real-world experiments illustrate the performance of our robotic beautician in mimicking realistic dermatological procedures; Our new method is shown to not only replicate the rhythmic movements from the provided demonstrations but also to adapt the acquired skills to previously unseen scenarios and subjects.