A knee resurfacing process has the steps of fixing a bone in a position, creating an incision in a knee so as to expose a surface of the knee, guiding a probe of a robot arm around the perimeter of a search zone on the surface of the knee, probing the probe of the robot arm onto the knee so as to define a plurality of points within the perimeter, collecting point cloud data from the plurality of points so as to form an image of the probed surface, and shaping the knee relative to the collected point cloud data. The step of guiding is hand guiding the probe so that the probe penetrates tissues at a bony surface of the knee and contacts the bone of the knee. A force of the contact of the probe with the bone of the knee is measured.