Short answer: it is not. Greater precision and enhanced dexterity are probably the most repeated arguments in the marketing of robotic surgery. But what exactly do we mean by precision?
As surgeons, we know something that is sometimes missing from the marketing narrative. The first time you sit at a console (in my case, da Vinci standard, first generation 14 years ago), something becomes immediately obvious: you have not suddenly acquired a more precise hand. You have acquired an intermediary (and a world of digital posibilities).
The surgeon’s hand moves the master controller. The robot interprets that movement. The instrument reproduces it inside the patient. Yes, the system can scale motion. Yes, it can filter physiological tremor. Yes, it can provide articulated instruments, stable visualization and, increasingly, force feedback (now entering systems such as the da Vinci 5). But none of this means that surgery with the robot is intrinsically more precise than without it. In fact, some of the technology is essentially trying to recover precision that was lost through the intermediary itself.
This is particularly obvious in microsurgery. Most surgeons who have tried to perform a microsuture with a conventional da Vinci know the feeling: the robot gives you extraordinary visualization and articulation, but you are not necessarily more precise. Actually, it is the opposite, you are better with your own hands.
And the literature is far more nuanced than the marketing message (see bellow). The evidence supports something subtler. Robotic systems can make some specific tasks more accurate. But that is very different from saying that robotic surgery is inherently more precise than human surgery.
And clinically, I believe we sometimes focus on the wrong advantage. The real revolution of surgical robotics has never been that the robot has magically given surgeons better hands. It is that it can allow surgeons to perform increasingly complex procedures through minimally invasive approaches, sometimes through natural or very small access routes that would otherwise require substantially more disruptive exposure. The clinical literature supports the importance of access and minimally invasive surgery much more convincingly than the idea of a universally superior robotic hand.
And this leads to a fascinating paradox. The history of surgical robotics may actually be a race to eliminate the consequences of the robotic intermediary. Perhaps to the moment when the surgeon no longer perceives the robot as an intermediary at all. But when the system can reproduce not only our movements, but also our perception, intention and interaction with tissue, with greater speed, consistency and accuracy than the human operator, that is when the robot may genuinely become more precise than us.
Notice the paradox. At that point, we will no longer be talking about better telemanipulation. We will be talking about autonomous or shared-autonomy surgery. The future of surgical robotics may not be about building a better pair of robotic hands. It may be about building a system that eventually no longer needs ours. And that is a much more interesting, and much more uncomfortable, definition of precision.
J Granell. Sep 6, 2026
References
Prasad SM, Prasad SM, Maniar HS, Chu C, Schuessler RB, Damiano RJ Jr. Surgical robotics: impact of motion scaling on task performance. J Am Coll Surg. 2004 Dec;199(6):863-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2004.08.027.
Knight CG, Lorincz A, Cao A, Gidell K, Klein MD, Langenburg SE. Computer-assisted, robot-enhanced open microsurgery in an animal model. J Laparoendosc Adv Surg Tech A. 2005 Apr;15(2):182-5. doi: 10.1089/lap.2005.15.182.
Schmidgall S, Opfermann JD, Kim JW, Krieger A. Will your next surgeon be a robot? Autonomy and AI in robotic surgery. Sci Robot. 2025 Jul 23;10(104):eadt0187. doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt0187.