Which surgical robot is most deployed?

Verdict

The Intuitive Surgical da Vinci is the most deployed surgical robot on Earth, and by a margin that no competitor is remotely close to closing. Intuitive's 2025 10-K puts the worldwide installed base at 11,106 systems as of December 31, 2025, up 12% from 9,902 a year earlier, with 1,721 new systems placed during 2025 alone (ISRG 10-K FY2025). Every other soft-tissue surgical robot vendor put together does not add up to a tenth of that number.

The runners-up depend heavily on what you count as a "surgical robot." Orthopedic robots (which cut bone, not soft tissue) are a genuinely separate category with a different buyer, different clearance pathway, and different economics. Include them and the podium changes; treat the category as strictly the general-surgery / urology / gynecology soft-tissue class that da Vinci defined, and the drop-off after Intuitive is a cliff.

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The winner in one paragraph

da Vinci sits at ~11,100 systems installed across ~70 countries after 25 years of a near-monopoly. The Xi (2014) and da Vinci 5 (2024) generations dominate; 1,231 da Vinci 5 systems were installed by end of 2025, with 870 of them shipped that year (Intuitive Q4/FY2025 release). Pricing is not a single sticker: capital lists in the $0.5M to $2.5M range depending on configuration, with the razor/blade revenue actually coming from EndoWrist instruments and services, which is why Intuitive resists disclosing a "verified" per-system sale price. Treat any single-number price as a manufacturer indication, not a real transaction.

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Runners-up, ranked by installed base

1. Stryker Mako (orthopedic)

Stryker has not published a current global install-base number in a single 10-K line, but has repeatedly disclosed "over 1.5 million Mako procedures performed globally across 45 countries" and record placements in Q1 2025 (Stryker AAOS 2025 coverage). Independent sell-side tallies put the fleet in the low-thousands, making Mako the second-largest surgical robot fleet in the world if you include orthopedics. It is the only credible competitor to da Vinci by procedure volume, and Stryker just started clinical cases with the handheld Mako RPS in 2026.

2. Zimmer Biomet ROSA (orthopedic)

Zimmer Biomet's investor materials describe ROSA as "rapidly approaching 2,000 installations worldwide" (Zimmer Biomet Q2 2025 8-K). Scope note: ROSA Spine left the ROSA line in the 2022 ZimVie spin-off, so the current ROSA install base is knee and hip only; that is why the platform gets a "corporate-state" note on its registry page. Still, on raw units this is one of the largest surgical-robot fleets outside da Vinci.

3. CMR Surgical Versius (soft-tissue)

CMR's own March 2026 statement is 45,000 patients treated globally across 30+ countries, with the company calling Versius "the second most widely used robotic surgery platform globally" (CMR press). That patient-count framing is doing work; the actual system count is not disclosed and is almost certainly in the low hundreds, not thousands. Versius Plus got FDA 510(k) clearance for cholecystectomy in December 2025, so the US install base is essentially just starting.

4. Medtronic Hugo RAS (soft-tissue)

Hugo is used in "tens of thousands" of procedures across 30+ countries, per Medtronic (Medtronic products page). Medtronic pointedly does not publish a system count. FDA clearance for US urologic procedures came only on December 3, 2025 (Medtronic release), with first US cases at Cleveland Clinic and Duke in early 2026. Hugo is Intuitive's most-hyped challenger, but the numbers say it is at the beginning of the S-curve, not the middle.

5. Johnson & Johnson Monarch (bronchoscopy) and Ottava (soft-tissue)

Monarch, acquired via J&J's $3.4B Auris purchase in 2019, is a robotic bronchoscopy platform, not a general-surgery robot; strictly speaking it competes with Intuitive's Ion (which is bundled into that ~11,100 count, but only barely). Ottava got FDA De Novo authorization in 2026 and is at "first cases" (J&J MedTech release). Neither has a fleet in the hundreds yet.

6. Smaller entrants worth naming

Asensus Surgical Senhance (soft-tissue, tiny fleet), Moon Surgical Maestro (co-manipulator, not a full robot), and a set of Chinese entrants including Edge Medical Robotics and MicroPort MedBot Toumai. Individually they are pilots-to-hundreds; none touches Mako or ROSA on unit count, let alone da Vinci.

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What appears to beat da Vinci but doesn't count

Robotic bronchoscopy fleets. Intuitive's Ion and J&J's Monarch are technically "surgical" in that they enter the body, but they biopsy, they don't operate. Tallying "endoscopic robots" and "surgical robots" together is aggregator drift. Even with Ion added to da Vinci, Intuitive still wins by a landslide; the point is that a "which surgical robot?" question should exclude flexible-bronchoscopy platforms when comparing to Mako or Versius, and include them when comparing to da Vinci (because Intuitive counts Ion in the same fleet number).

Orthopedic-only totals. Add Mako (~1.5M+ procedures), ROSA (~2,000 units), Smith+Nephew CORI (thousands of cases), and Globus Medical's ExcelsiusGIN and you get a large orthopedic robot population; the aggregate handily exceeds Versius or Hugo. But orthopedic robots do not compete with da Vinci for the same OR, budget, or surgeon. Calling them "the most deployed surgical robot" only makes sense if the question is "most deployed robotic-assisted device in an operating room, of any kind," and even then da Vinci wins because it is used across dozens of procedure types daily per system.

Surgical navigation and cobot systems. Systems like Medtronic's StealthStation or Brainlab's Cirq are widely installed but are navigation or single-arm assistants, not the full surgeon-console-and-arms architecture that defines what patients, hospitals, and insurers call a "surgical robot." Include them and the numbers explode into meaninglessness.

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Gotchas and caveats

Installed base is not procedure volume. Intuitive reported approximately 2.68 million da Vinci procedures worldwide in 2024 and continued to grow that number in 2025 (Intuitive Q4 release). Utilization per system is what actually indicates dominance, and it is climbing, not slowing, despite the Hugo/Versius/Ottava competitive wave.

"Verified" pricing does not exist for any of these platforms. Vendors quote list ranges, hospitals negotiate opaque bundle deals with EndoWrist / stapler / consumable commitments, and no manufacturer publishes a per-system sale-price line. Any "da Vinci costs $X" number in the media is a manufacturer target or an analyst estimate; label it that way, or don't quote it. See the surgical-robot pricing overview for the sourced breakdown.

Regulatory scope varies more than aggregators admit. Versius has De Novo authorization (Oct 2024, cholecystectomy) and Versius Plus 510(k) clearance (Dec 2025); it is not "wholesale FDA-pending" as several trackers still say. Hugo is US-cleared only for urology as of end-2025. Ottava's De Novo scope covers a specific procedure list, not everything da Vinci does. Comparing "cleared surgical robots" without checking which indications is misleading; the FDA-cleared surgical robots synthesis page enumerates the clearances per platform.

Safety data is not zero for da Vinci either. The FDA issued a Class 2 recall on the da Vinci 5 surgeon-console viewer display in 2025-2026, and MAUDE contains malfunction reports across every major platform (Mako reamer screws, Versius controller failures, older da Vinci arm faults). Dominance in unit count is not a claim about safety.

Chinese domestic fleets are undercounted. MicroPort MedBot Toumai, Edge Medical Robotics, and several other domestic Chinese platforms have installed bases inside China that Western trackers systematically underweight. None appears close to da Vinci globally, but the true global "second place" number for soft-tissue is probably higher than Western coverage suggests.

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Bottom line

If you want one sourced sentence to walk away with: 11,106 da Vinci systems worldwide as of December 31, 2025 make it the most deployed surgical robot by roughly an order of magnitude, with Stryker's Mako the only credible challenger on total procedure volume (via orthopedics) and Medtronic Hugo, CMR Versius, and J&J Ottava still measured in hundreds of systems, not thousands. Everything else is scope-of-comparison games.

Sources: Intuitive Surgical 10-K FY2025 · Intuitive Q4 FY2025 release · Zimmer Biomet Q2 2025 8-K · Stryker AAOS 2025 coverage · CMR Surgical 45k patients release · Medtronic Hugo FDA urology clearance · J&J Ottava first cases.