Internship - Vicarious Surgical

Vicarious Surgical is a robotics startup based in Massachusetts working on minimally invasive, robotic surgery. During my time here, their capital equipment is two parts: the Surgeon Console and the Patient Cart. The surgeon console is what the system the surgeon would sit at to control the robot, and the patient cart was the system with the robot does the surgery. The patient cart was where I spent the majority of my time at Vicarious.

On the patient cart itself, I started my time at Vicarious by completing a full teardown with the integration team to complete some much-needed upgrades. During this process, I rebuilt wiring harnesses, made new PCB mounting brackets, and got a good understanding of the whole system. One of the major subsystems of the cart was used to make the actual arms of the robot move. I rewired several units for compatibility purposes, and regularly rebuilt units.

My later focus ultimately was on creating tools to aid in the manufacturing, assembly, and testing phases of surgical robot arm systems. The two big ones are as follows:

Modular Test Bench:

Problem: The current testing method loops through a recording of a robotic suture with a weight attached to the end to simulate feedback until something in the arm breaks. They then go back to identify where it broke and mark the time at which it broke. There are too many variables here, and they wanted something consistent to be able to test individual joints to see if design changes improved.

Solution: I reconfigured how the test bench held the arm and applied the weight so that a technician could quickly position the robot arm for testing a particular joint, allowing it to be cycled until failure. I updated the documentation for building this test bench, and then built two more for additional testing. This helped speed up workflow, and by the end of my internship, directly led to the identification of 2 failure causes and improved average robot arm lifespan by 1 hour (from about 7 hours of operating time to 8 hours)

Gear Alignment:

Problem: Special gears had to be manually installed at the ends of custom shaft collars for motors driving the robot cables. Small differences (< 4mm) could mean the difference between a good alignment, poor alignment with a lot of backlash, or damage to shaft collars, motors, or other components. This led to inconsistent failures of the system every time a new robot arm was attached to the primary device, making it difficult to identify the root cause of the issue.

Solution: I designed and built a tool that aligned the gears to less than 1 mm variance per install. From the time the tool was implemented, no failures as a result of gear issues were reported for the rest of my internship.

Finally, I wrote up a Bill of Materials for the new surgeon console, created Material specification sheets, and drafted the wiring assemblies. I then validated this work by creating the wiring harnesses that are now being used in the new console. To make it a little easier on everyone, I also took some time to reorganize a lot of our smaller hardware that made finding parts like a bolt or Allen key difficult.

Due to confidentiality, I won't add any photos that aren’t publicly available, but this was an amazing experience where I learned a lot of organizational skills!

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