Surgical Robot Machine Vision Patents: Who Leads, Gaps 2026
- Filing has cooled since its 2021 peak. 90 families published that year against 5 so far in 2026, with the 2022 midpoint of 47 already signalling flat-to-declining momentum rather than continued acceleration.
- A61B dominates, but the vision layer sits underneath it. 448 of 467 records touch A61B surgery claims, while only 45 reach G06T image processing and 13 reach G01B dimensional measurement — the vision-specific layers are thinner than the surgical-system layer built on top of them.
- Momentum is uneven even among the largest holders. Auris Health logged 4 families in the latest year, down 56% year-over-year, while several other major assignees show zero recent-year filings — concentration at the top does not mean continued activity.
Filing growth compares 2021 (90 records) with 2024 (27) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 467 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this patent set covers
This landscape covers 467 patent families published between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine surgical robotics with endoscopic vision guidance, surgical scene recognition, or vision-based tracking. The search pairs robotic-surgery language with machine-vision language, so it captures systems that fuse kinematic control with camera-derived scene understanding rather than robotic arms or endoscopes considered separately. Publication lags filing by roughly eighteen months, so the 2025-2026 counts in any trend chart understate actual filing activity for those years.
The technology composition points to a layered structure: a large surgical-systems base (A61B) sits above a much thinner manipulator layer (B25J) and a still-thinner vision-processing layer (G06T, G01B, G01L). That thinness is where the freedom to operate is likely to be found, and where a new entrant's claims are least likely to collide with an incumbent's granted scope.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 467-family dataset: how filing activity has moved year over year, and how those families distribute across IPC subclasses.
A 2021 peak followed by a decline
Filings rose from 6 in 2017 to a peak of 90 in 2021, then fell through a 2022 midpoint of 47 down to 5 in the most recent (partial) year. Read the tail end cautiously: publication lag means 2025-2026 figures will rise as later filings are published, but the shape from 2021 onward is a genuine slowdown, not an artefact of the cut-off alone.
A surgery-heavy, vision-thin composition
A61B (diagnosis and surgery) covers 448 of 467 records, with B25J (manipulators and robots) a distant second at 119. The specifically vision-oriented subclasses — G06T image processing at 45, G01L force/pressure measurement at 17, and G01B dimensional measurement at 13 — are comparatively sparse, indicating that most claims still frame vision as a feature of a surgical system rather than as the inventive core.
Shares are the percentage of the 467 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Surgical Robot Machine Vision with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about surgical robot machine vision and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records and the most recent filing
WO2026150291A1 — Surgical robotic system and method for registering multiple distributed robotic arms by fusing robot kinematics and vision
A surgical robotic system and method provide for registering multiple distributed robotic arms using a combination of robot kinematics and vision-based tracking. The system includes a plurality of robotic arms, mobile carts, surgical instruments, and a stereoscopic camera configured to capture images of the surgical site. Features on instruments are identified in stereo images, matched, and projected into 3D coordinates. Forward kinematics calculates instrument poses, which are aligned with vision-based detections through iterative closest point (ICP) algorithms and pose graph optimization.Filed by Covidien LP, published 2026-07-16 — the most recent record in this dataset.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US9763741B2 | System for robotic-assisted endolumenal surgery and related methods | 953 |
| 2 | US9737371B2 | Configurable robotic surgical system with virtual rail and flexible endoscope | 540 |
| 3 | US20190000559A1 | Electromagnetic field generator alignment | 450 |
| 4 | US20190000560A1 | Electromagnetic distortion detection | 449 |
| 5 | US10016900B1 | Surgical robotic arm admittance control | 426 |
| 6 | US20190175062A1 | System and method for medical instrument navigation and targeting | 409 |
| 7 | US10145747B1 | Detection of undesirable forces on a surgical robotic arm | 408 |
| 8 | US20190336238A1 | Instrument device manipulator with tension sensing apparatus | 399 |
| 9 | US20170340396A1 | Configurable robotic surgical system with virtual rail and flexible endoscope | 392 |
| 10 | US9844412B2 | Methods and apparatus for constructing endoscopic device with helical lumen design | 391 |
Citation counts accumulate over time and favour older filings; use them to gauge influence on subsequent art, not current commercial relevance.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three patterns stand out once the trend and composition data are read together.
The surge has already happened
Filing activity peaked in 2021 and has declined every year since, with the 2022 midpoint of 47 confirming the drop is not a single-year anomaly. Publication lag means the last two years will fill in somewhat, but the multi-year decline predates that lag window.
Vision claims are a minority even in a vision-themed search
Despite the search terms targeting vision guidance explicitly, only 45 of 467 families carry a G06T classification and just 13 reach G01B dimensional measurement. Most vision functionality is being claimed as part of broader A61B surgical-system claims rather than as standalone image-processing inventions.
Even active filers are pulling back
Auris Health remains the most active recent filer at 4 families in the latest year, but that is down 56% year over year. Several other large holders, including Intuitive Surgical and Medtronic, show zero recent-year filings in this dataset, suggesting consolidation of claim scope rather than continued expansion.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to surgical robot machine vision, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claims, and where they are not filing
Assignee activity is concentrated among a handful of surgical robotics specialists, but recent-year momentum has slowed across nearly all of them.
Auris Health leads recent activity, but is decelerating
Auris Health is the only assignee in this set with meaningful latest-year output, and even that figure is down 56% from the prior year. Co-assignee pairs linking Auris Surgical Robotics entities to named inventors suggest ongoing internal R&D rather than acquisition-driven filing.
Large prior filers have gone quiet
Intuitive Surgical, Medtronic and Cilag International each show zero families in the latest year despite historical presence in this space, which typically signals either portfolio maturity or a shift in R&D priority away from this specific vision-fusion niche.
Covidien LP files the newest record in the set
The most recent filing, WO2026150291A1, comes from Covidien LP and focuses on multi-arm registration by fusing kinematics with stereoscopic vision — a sign that established medical device manufacturers are still entering this specific technical corner even as aggregate filing has slowed.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Auris Health | 4 | -56% |
| Covidien LP | 1 | — |
| Auris Surgical Robotics | 0 | — |
| Cilag International | 0 | -100% |
| Medtronic | 0 | — |
| Intuitive Surgical Operations | 0 | — |
| EZISURG Medical | 0 | — |
| STRYKER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a few concrete next steps depending on whether the goal is freedom-to-operate, portfolio strategy, or competitive tracking.
Check freedom to operate in the vision layer
With only 45 families reaching G06T and 13 reaching G01B, a claim built specifically around image-processing or dimensional-measurement methods for surgical scenes has more room than one built around general A61B surgical-system architecture.
Run a freedom-to-operate search in EurekaTrack the assignees still filing
Auris Health and Covidien LP are the two active signals in the latest years; watching their continuation filings and co-assignee patterns is a more reliable indicator of where the field is heading than the aggregate trend line.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaRe-run the trend once lag clears
Because publication lags filing by about eighteen months, the 2025-2026 decline should be re-checked in twelve to eighteen months against fresh data before treating it as a confirmed slowdown.
Explore the full dataset in EurekaCommon questions about surgical robot machine vision patents
Auris Health and Auris Surgical Robotics show the most sustained recent activity in this dataset, though Intuitive Surgical, Medtronic, Covidien and Cilag International all appear as historical filers. Ranking by raw document count can overstate a single company's position if it relies heavily on continuations, so patent families are the more reliable unit for comparing true portfolio size. Recent-year momentum matters as much as total volume here, since several large historical filers show zero families in the latest year.
No, filing activity peaked in 2021 at 90 families and has declined every year since, reaching just 5 in the latest partial year. The 2022 midpoint of 47 confirms this is a multi-year decline rather than a single-year dip. Publication lag of roughly eighteen months means the final two years will likely revise upward somewhat, but the downward trend from 2021 predates that lag window and looks genuine.
Surgical robot patents broadly cover manipulator design, control, and instrument delivery, classified mainly under B25J and A61B. Surgical robot vision patents specifically add camera-based scene recognition, endoscopic guidance, or vision-based tracking, which show up in this dataset under the thinner G06T, G01B and G01L subclasses. Most vision functionality in this space is still claimed as a feature within a broader surgical-system patent rather than as a standalone vision invention, so the two categories overlap heavily rather than sitting side by side.
The clearest gaps sit in dimensional tracking (only 13 of 467 families reach G01B) and force-feedback fusion with vision (17 families touch G01L). Scene recognition for soft-tissue deformation and healthcare informatics integration (G16H, 37 families) are also comparatively under-claimed relative to the dense A61B surgical-system layer. A first claim in these areas would need to specifically target the sensing or measurement method rather than folding it into a general surgical-robot system claim, since that general framing is where most existing coverage already sits.
WO2026150291A1, filed by Covidien LP and published 2026-07-16, claims a method for registering multiple distributed robotic arms by fusing forward kinematics with stereoscopic vision-based tracking, using iterative closest point alignment and pose graph optimisation. It affects anyone building multi-arm surgical robotic systems that rely on combined kinematic-and-vision registration rather than kinematics or vision alone. Because it is the most recent filing in this dataset, its granted claim scope is not yet settled, so teams working on similar multi-arm registration approaches should track its prosecution rather than assume its current claim language is final.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.