Mechanical Robotics Intern
Auris Surgical Robotics - Summer 2017
Auris Surgical Robotics is a Silicon Valley-based startup designing an innovative system for robotic surgery. Their first goal is early identification and treatment of lung cancer, followed by minimally invasive treatment of a variety of conditions that can be aided by surgical intervention.
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Over the course of the summer, I worked on several projects. Auris designs both tools and overall systems. I worked on their early R&D team on projects that provided groundwork for future commercial products, rather than on soon-to-be-released product.
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On the surgical tooling side, I worked on two projects. The first was a a device to measure the range of motion for tools designed in-house. This device went through several iterations, improving on size and ease of use for our team. The second project was research on competitors' tools, to determine the minimum requirements for the tools that we design.
My last project was on the system design side. We found that our setting up our system had one particular step that made testing cumbersome. My assignment was to design a device to make that part of setup easier. I worked with doctors to determine requirements on speed of setup and robustness of the system, and prototyped several versions of my device. While my device will not be used in our released product, the interviews and co-design with the doctors provided valuable insights into what they considered a secure and easy-to-use system. My device improved times for this part of the setup from over 65 seconds down to 15, improving our testing time and ability to iterate quickly.