Vicarious Surgical - Advanced Manufacturing Engineering Intern

Vicarious Surgical is a robotics startup based in Massachusetts working on minimally invasive Robotic surgery. In their current state, their capital equipment is two parts; the Surgeon Console and the Patient Cart. The surgeon console what the system the surgeon would sit at to control the robot, and the patient cart was the system with the robot doing the surgery. The patient cart was where I spent a 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, regularly rebuilt units, and designed a small alignment tool to properly align shaft collars that were previously causing several problems. 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. On the side, I got to watch live demos of the product and listen in on the surgeons' opinions and learn how the engineering team was going to make changes. Due to confidentiality I won't add any photos.