As waiting rooms fill up, doctors get increasingly burnt out, and surgeries take longer to schedule and more get cancelled, humanoid surgical robots offer a solution. That’s the argument that UC San Diego robotics expert Michael Yip makes in a perspective piece out July 8 in Science Robotics. 

Optical three-dimensional (3D) measurement plays a vital role in various fields such as intelligent manufacturing and biomedical engineering, particularly in high-precision inspection and the reconstruction of complex structures. Current 3D measurement techniques are broadly categorized into interferometric and non-interferometric approaches. Interferometric methods, such as shear interferometry and white-light interferometry, are widely applied in nanometer-scale metrology and precision manufacturing due to their superior depth resolution. However, these techniques often rely on complex optical setups composed of numerous bulk optical components, resulting in bulky systems with high environmental stability requirements, thereby limiting their suitability for real-time, in-line measurement applications.