Surgical Robot (R1 & Rev10)

The R1 is Neuralink's surgical robot, the machine that places the company's brain implant. Its job is the one thing no human hand can do reliably: inserting dozens of hair-thin, flexible electrode threads into a living, pulsing brain with precision measured in microns, which are millionths of a meter. It pairs with the N1 brain implant, and every Neuralink trial depends on it.

What is the R1 Robot?

R1 is a three-part machine, made up of a head, a body, and a base, and it is built to place the N1 implant's electrode threads into the cortex, which is the brain's outer layer. The threads are just 4 to 6 microns thick, thinner than a human hair, and together they carry up to 1,024 electrodes into the tissue. A neurosurgeon opens the skull and closes it back up, and R1 does the delicate insertion in between. Neuralink first showed a surgical robot in July 2019 and unveiled the redesigned machine that became R1 in August 2020, beside a pig named Gertrude whose brain signals beeped through a speaker.

Why the R1 Robot Exists

Neuralink, founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and a team of engineers and neuroscientists, faced an engineering challenge early on. The threads it wanted to implant are too thin and too floppy to place by hand, no matter how skilled the surgeon. The company concluded that human surgical skill had a firm ceiling for this task, so it built a robot, the only approach that could work.

How it Works

The work splits cleanly between human and machine. A neurosurgeon performs the craniotomy, which means opening the skull and the dura, the brain's tough outer membrane, then mounts the device and closes everything up afterward. In between, R1 handles the precise part. It uses five camera systems plus optical coherence tomography, an imaging method that can see just beneath the surface, along with a planning map built from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans taken before the operation. With all of that guiding it, the robot steers a needle made of tungsten-rhenium alloy, roughly half the width of a hair, to grab, insert, and release each thread while dodging blood vessels in real time.

The Economics of the R1 Robot

R1's value is repeatability. By standardizing the hardest step, the robot lets the number of procedures rise and should bring the cost per implant down over time. R1 is the tool behind Neuralink's whole clinical program, the PRIME, CONVOY, and VOICE studies, and any product that comes later. Each implant also carries lasting software value, because most of the capability lives in code, so the device can improve without a second operation. Neuralink has not published what an implant or a surgery costs.

The State of the R1 Robot Today

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the PRIME Study (Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface), which covers both the N1 implant and the R1 robot, in May 2023. In January 2024 R1 performed the first human implant, on quadriplegic patient Noland Arbaugh. By March he was moving a cursor by thought on a livestream, playing chess and other games. Even after a large share of his threads pulled back from the tissue, Neuralink recovered most of the lost capability through software alone, without a second operation.

Neuralink counted 3 implants by January 2025, 12 by September 2025, and 21 at its January 28, 2026 update. Neura Pod counts 27+ people with Neuralink implants as of October 2026, across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

What Comes Next

Neuralink's Summer 2025 update showed its next-generation surgical robot, Rev10, beside R1, built for a faster cycle time and deeper reach. In April 2026 Neuralink said its new robot uses 8 cameras and optical coherence tomography scanners to guide the needle, and that it can push the threads through the dura instead of removing it. On May 20, 2026 at University Health Network in Toronto, surgeons implanted Lee Marten, a Vancouver police sergeant, by inserting the threads through the dura without opening it, a first for Neuralink.

R1 now serves more than one study. PRIME covers digital control, and the CONVOY Study, launched in November 2024, extends the N1 implant to a physical robotic arm and lets PRIME participants take part as well. Two more FDA Breakthrough Device Designations point to where this is headed: Blindsight for restoring vision, in September 2024, and speech restoration in May 2025, which became the VOICE Study that October. Every one of these uses runs through the same surgical step, so every one of them depends on the same robot.

The Bottom Line

R1 turns the most delicate step in the surgery, threading electrodes into a living brain, into a procedure that surgeons at 5 hospitals now repeat. Its successor already pushes threads through the dura, which removes a step from the surgery.