A surgeon in Chicago guiding instruments in Santa Barbara. A transformer model predicting 50 robot steps in 100 milliseconds. High-fidelity factory twins stress-testing a manipulator before it ever touches metal. Over the past year those three threads-telesurgery platforms, robot foundation models, and hyper-realistic simulation-have begun to braid together, moving humanoid systems from experiments toward regulated, real-world missions.

This convergence matters because it changes how engineers raise a robot’s technology readiness level. Clinical systems and humanoid platforms face the same bottlenecks: scarce real-world data, brittle perception in edge cases, and regulatory demand for provable safety. Investors and startups are spending billions to tackle those gaps with new data architectures, industry consortia, and simulation tools.

Why the industry is betting on remote-enabled robots now

Hospitals, manufacturers, and venture funds are treating remote capability as the next baseline for surgical and service robots. Sovato Health’s CEO Cynthia Perazzo told Medical Design & Outsourcing that “Remote surgeries and procedures are inevitable,” and the company closed a $26 million Series B that included an investment from Intuitive Surgical to accelerate device-agnostic telesurgery middleware (The Robot Report, Nov. 25, 2025).

The commercial case is plain: a recent market analysis found that of 10 million major operating-room procedures performed annually in the U.S., only about 2.5% are robotic-assisted. With robotic penetration so low, there is substantial headroom for systems that unlock specialist capacity and OR utilization across integrated delivery networks. For hospital administrators, telesurgery promises schedule flexibility and better use of subspecialists without forcing them to relocate patients or staff.

Foundation models that speak robot: what changes when perception and action share a core

Regulatory pressure is rising in parallel. Sovato’s work with device firms and cybersecurity partners has produced technical guidelines intended to support 510(k) submissions. This reflects that robotics companies will typically seek clearance for remote use as part of device approvals rather than via separate platform approvals.

Physical Intelligence and other startups argue that the same transformer architectures that reshaped language can bootstrap generalist control in physical robots. In November 2025 Physical Intelligence closed a $600 million Series B led by CapitalG, valuing the company near $5.6 billion. The firm says its vision-language-action (VLA) models, in the 3-5‑billion‑parameter range, can predict the next 50 action steps in roughly 100 milliseconds and double throughput on tasks such as inserting filters or folding laundry (The Robot Report, Nov. 25, 2025).

Digital twins and stress testing: closing the gap between sim and reality

That latency and planning horizon matter for humanoids because complex manipulation requires coordinated, anticipatory motion across many joints and contact points. A 100 ms prediction window lets a controller plan multi-step contact sequences and respect force limits, reducing abrupt corrections that can traumatize tissue in medical use or break parts in a factory.

Open-sourcing parts of these stacks also accelerates cross-lab reproducibility. Physical Intelligence published code and weights for its π0 algorithms earlier in 2025, lowering the barrier for labs that need to reproduce behavior or audit failure modes before buying a commercial system.

Simulation is no longer a lightweight prototype step. Parallax Worlds raised a $4 million seed round in late 2025 to build hyper-realistic digital twins that convert simple video walkthroughs into interactive 3D environments compatible with Omniverse, Unreal, or Unity (The Robot Report, Nov. 25, 2025). Customers run their actual control software and perception stacks in the loop, exposing edge cases weeks or months before a physical deployment.

Sources

• Sovato CEO says big telesurgery advances are coming soon - The Robot Report - The Robot Report, 2025-11-25

• Physical Intelligence raises $600M to advance robot foundation models - The Robot Report - The Robot Report, 2025-11-25

• Parallax Worlds raises $4M, stress-test robots with hyper-realistic digital twins - The Robot Report - The Robot Report, 2025-11-25

• Surgical robotics market to double by 2029: report - The Robot Report - The Robot Report, 2025-11-28