During keyhole surgery, surgeons typically rely on sight as they remotely control the delicate operation. A new robot promises to give them one important extra sense: touch. The invention, revealed Wednesday at the Australasian Simulation Congress in Melbourne, Australia, is called the HeroSurg. Created by a team at Australia's Deakin University, as well as Harvard University, the robot may look a little terrifying but its inventors hope it will make operations safer and more accurate. Unlike most current keyhole surgery tools, the robot uses haptic feedback to deliver a sense of touch to the operator, as well as 3D images so the surgeon can see where their instruments are placed.

Deakin University in Melbourne has unveiled the HeroSurg robot, which gives surgeons, for the first time, the sense of touch while they perform surgery via a computer. Unveiled on Wednesday at the Australasian Simulation Congress, the university claims HeroSurg to be a major breakthrough compared to current technology, which limits robotic surgery to the sense of sight. Giving surgeons the added sense of touch through technology known as haptic feedback means laparoscopic or keyhole microsurgery will be safer and more accurate by reducing trauma and lowering the risk of blood loss and infection. HeroSurg is the world's first robot that provides surgeons the sense of touch HeroSurg was developed in the laboratory at Deakin's Waurn Ponds campus in Geelong by engineers from Deakin and Harvard, along with professor Suren Krishnan, who in 2008 became the first Australian surgeon to use the da Vinci surgical system for ear, nose, and throat procedures. Krishnan, from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and an honorary professor at the Deakin Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI), said HeroSurg's added sense of touch improves the ability of surgeons to distinguish between normal tissue and tissue affected by cancer.