New Partnership Advances Physical AI into Perioperative Workflows

Perioperative operations often span sterile processing, operating rooms, logistics, and equipment coordination across disconnected systems, teams, and data layers, creating coordination challenges. Although robotics have advanced within procedures, they frequently lack continuous, real-time understanding to function around the procedure and within broader workflows. A new multi-phase initiative addresses this gap by introducing an integrated intelligence and orchestration layer across perioperative environments, with the goal of enabling the deployment of humanoid robots in live clinical settings.

Lightwheel and PeritasAI announced a strategic partnership to combine PeritasAI’s agentic orchestration platform with Lightwheel’s physical artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to enable robots to train, validate, and operate within healthcare workflows. The multi-phase initiative is an estimated $56 million program focused on deploying an integrated intelligence and orchestration layer across perioperative environments. Plans call for enabling up to 200 humanoid robots to begin deployment over 2026 and 2027, with the aim of operating within real clinical workflows rather than test settings.

Lightwheel’s role centers on the infrastructure required to make robotic systems deployment-ready for perioperative environments. This includes simulation, Real‑to‑Sim and Sim‑to‑Real pipelines, synthetic and egocentric data generation, training systems, and evaluation frameworks designed to train, validate, and refine robots before they enter live clinical workflows. PeritasAI contributes the agentic intelligence and orchestration layer through its PeriVerse platform, which continuously interprets perioperative activity, coordinates workflows in real time, and enables intelligent systems to take appropriate action as conditions change.

Initial pilot activities are underway with select healthcare systems and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners. These pilots are designed to support real-world validation, workflow integration, and phased deployment planning. The collaboration emphasizes bringing physical AI into healthcare operations as coordinated participants within live workflows, rather than as isolated systems.

"Healthcare doesn't need more point solutions, it needs a system that can understand and coordinate the entire perioperative environment in real time. We're building the orchestration layer that connects fragmented workflows and enables intelligent systems to operate within them, supporting surgical teams by taking on operational burden so they can stay focused fully on patient care," said Cortney Knoll, CEO of PeritasAI.

"Physical AI will only create real value when it can operate reliably in the world's most complex environments. Healthcare is one of the hardest, and this partnership reflects a shared belief that real deployment starts with the right infrastructure to simulate, validate, and evaluate robotic systems before they enter real-world perioperative environments," said Louis Lian, VP of Partnerships and Strategy at Lightwheel.

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