Imagine rolling into an operating room to find that your surgical team included a robot. While full-fledged robotic surgeons aren't quite ready for the spotlight, automatons have already found a foothold in the surgical theater. Some systems allow doctors to control robotic instruments—ones able to slice and dice with inhuman precision—using controls or a computer screen, while other medical robots take a doctor's place entirely to conduct specific segments of a larger surgery. Now scientists have taken a big step forward with the latter type of bot: in a study published Wednesday in Science Robotics, a team reports the first ever robot-assisted cochlear implantation surgery.

"We were on this project for more than eight years," says lead study author Stefan Weber, a professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland's ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research. "And in contrast to a lot of research, we really stuck to one application for the entire time."