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Robotic Medicine
As missions go farther from Earth, help from the ground gets slower and evacuation gets harder. This section asks what robots could safely do for crew health, and builds a library of clinical protocols written so a robot can follow them and humans can audit them.
Capabilities at a glance
Nine care domains against three autonomy levels, each marked feasible now, near-term or speculative, with a one-line note.
Library indexRobot-readable protocol library
79 conceptual protocols in 17 body-system categories, with IDs, autonomy limits, status and priority. Searchable.
Protocols · new75 draft protocols, robot-readable
Full conceptual drafts, each with a step-by-step view and a YAML file checked against a published schema. Each reviewed (AI-assisted) Oct 20–21, 2026, with every required correction applied; the others are in clinical review. No named human clinician has reviewed any of them.
Simulation · newGround flight surgeon live console
Supervise a simulated care robot through the kidney ultrasound protocol (RMP-RENAL-001) at station, Moon and Mars delays. See when your commands actually land.
Article seriesRobotic and autonomous medical care
The thought-experiment series behind this section.
Part 1 · reviewed (AI-assisted)Could a humanoid robot be a medical crewmember?
Precedents, limits, ethics and rules, and the 13-part protocol framework with a worked kidney-stone example.
Rules that never change
- The flight surgeon is the medical authority. The crew medical officer acts under delegated care, and uses a pre-approved checklist when there is no link.
- A human starts the robot, can stop it at any time, and restarts it after any emergency stop.
- The robot never diagnoses, and gives no drug or fluid advice.
- Imaging is diagnostic only. Therapeutic ultrasound and needle guidance are locked out.
- On a fault, a lost link or no human response, the robot goes to its stopped (safe-state) position and waits.
From NASA’s design standard for robots (NASA-STD-3001 Volume 2, Section 10.6) and NASA medical operations. Details and sources in Part 1 and the shared safety rules.
Capability board
Rung 1 ground-steered · Rung 2 supervised · Rung 3 conditional. Open the full outline with notes →
Connected on this site
- Crew Health Command Center (Telemetry): the kind of data stream a care robot would read and add to.
- Research and the risk atlas: in-mission medical conditions.
- Clinical articles, which the protocol categories mirror.
References 2
- NASA. NASA-STD-3001, Volume 2: Human Factors, Habitability, and Environmental Health, Revision F (2026), Section 10.6 Automated and Robotic Systems. standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-3001_VOL_2
- NASA OCHMO. Medical Operations. Technical Brief OCHMO-TB-044 (2025). Crew surgeon keeps medical authority under delegated care; crew medical officers train on the JSC 48522 medical checklist. www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/ochmo-tb-044-medical…
Checked on 2026-10-20: each link returned HTTP 200 (or redirected to the publisher), DOIs and PubMed IDs were matched in Crossref and PubMed, and each claim was checked against the source text.