A company in the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang province has developed a robot that can do surgical operations on animals and is expected to be adapted for humans after some improvements.

The device looks like a large operating table with many arms, with a place for the doctor to sit and give instructions. It can do much more than humans with greater flexibility and accuracy thanks to a 3D stereoscopic vision system to pinpoint a site and make a much smaller incision.

The robot has gone through the experimental phase at Beijing’s Hospital No 301, where it took only 24 minutes to remove a pig’s gallbladder, after which the pig recovered in just two weeks.

The key developers are all from the Harbin Institute of Technology’s robot research institute and are working to compete against the Da Vinci Surgical System, an American robot system, which has cornered the robotic surgery business, with more than 30 of these devices in use across China, costing about 20 million yuan ($3.23 million) each.