I joined Articulus Surgical at its inception as a founding team member and one of its first contributors. The vision — building an indigenous, sustainable and accessible robot-assisted surgery (RAS) system to bring advanced medical technology within reach of more people — served as our north star.

Articulus is a team of ambitious engineers from diverse backgrounds, founded by Mr. Saurya Mishra, a post-graduate from IIT Kharagpur with over a decade of experience in medical devices at companies such as Philips Healthcare.

Pulsar Robot Assisted Laparoscopy

I began my journey at Articulus as a mechatronics engineer in November 2021, tasked with ideating and developing mechanisms for a 6-DOF remote-centre robot based on a circular carriage-driver gantry. Later, I took ownership of the end-to-end design and development of the surgeon’s console, which involved designing joints and the structure of a 7-DOF serial manipulator.

Because the console used passive joints, gravity compensation (initially via counterbalance and later using springs) was a significant design challenge. The mechanism I designed was described by several doctors and investors as being “as smooth as a motor-driver mechanism.” Alongside mechanical design, I led industrial design and user experience efforts for all R&D projects.

Given the small team size, I also developed firmware on an ESP32 (ESP-IDF) to read absolute joint encoders and convert readings to joint angles. That data stream was transmitted over RS-232 to a PC, where it fed into a forward kinematics model to compute end-effector parameters.

Later, I gained hands-on experience in PID controller design and tuning for DC motors. I implemented the controllers on an RP2040 using the PICO-SDK and deployed them to robot joint actuators.

Comet Handheld Motorised Laparoscopic

As a spin-off project, I designed a handheld motorised laparoscopic instrument to control a 3-DOF end-effector. The capstan mechanism concept was adapted from the Pulsar instrument. Surgeon arm motion was encoded using a 3-DOF gimbal and translated into joint angles for the instrument.