Project Goals

Open Surgical is robotic system that aims to democratize robotic surgery training and spur AI surgical robotics research. We believe that this can be achieved with affordable hardware that offers carefully selected subset of features of clinically-approved surgical systems.

Existing surgical robotics systems require high-tech engineering solutions, huge upfront investments, and rigorous maintenance to ensure safety. In contrast, our robot focuses on ex-vivo training procedures. This simplifies design requirements, the manufacturing process, and rigorous safety requirements. We designed OpenSurgical to be easy to maintain and assemble, while still using original DaVinci EndoWrist® tools and the same kinematic chain. As a result, the robot possesses most of the manipulation capabilities and motion characteristics of existing minimally-invasive robots, at only a tiny fraction of their cost.