The field of medical robotics has rapidly grown in recent years, offering healthcare professionals unprecedented features for preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic applications. Examples of medical applications for robotic manipulators include teleoperated diagnostic systems, such as ultrasound imaging, and minimally invasive surgery through endoscopic, laparoscopic, intraluminal, and endoluminal approaches. Despite these advancements, there remain significant challenges in the structural design, materials, actuation and sensing modalities, control systems, and intelligence of medical robots. Recent studies have shown promising developments in untethered robots, soft robots, magneto- and electro-active robots, extrinsically actuated robots, and pneumatic robots, which have increased hopes for smaller, more dexterous, and more human-body-friendly medical robots. However, embedding miniaturized or soft sensors within the medical robot's structure, or using sensor-free feedback estimation methods to control medical robots, are areas that still require further exploration and validation.

This Research Topic aims to generate a collection of state-of-the-art research that showcases various multidisciplinary approaches for tackling the challenges of developing medical robots for real-world applications. The primary objective is to follow an evidence-based, step-by-step transition from "clinical need" to "clinical requirements," "engineering requirement," "design," "verification," and finally "validation." This approach is not only essential for ensuring the practical utility and safety of medical robots but is also mandated by regulatory bodies worldwide. By familiarizing the next generation of researchers with this comprehensive research approach, we aim to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical implementation in the field of medical robotics.

To gather further insights into the boundaries of medical robot design, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Identification of clinical needs and requirements for medical robots: surveys or original research on identification and justification of clinical requirements for various applications based on clinical evidence, standards, rationale, and experts' opinion.
- Engineering and computational designs for clinical needs, including structural design and modeling, material selection and synthesis, actuation modalities, sensing principles, and sensor-free estimators.
- Design of risk-aware robots and incorporation of risk-awareness as risk control strategies for medical robots.
- Design of validation studies for medical robots.
- Ethical and regulatory considerations for medical robots, especially in conjunction with the development and use of artificial intelligence in medical robots.
- Clinical evaluation of medical robots, performance assessment of medical robots, clinical adoption of medical robots, and challenges and future directions in medical robotics.

We welcome submissions from researchers, clinicians, engineers, industrialists, and policymakers working in the field of medical robotics. Manuscripts should be structured to reflect the researchers' approach to addressing a clinical need through robotic solutions and how they benchmarked the proposed solutions against the requirements (i.e., validation).

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Frontiers in Robotics and AI

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