Alright so get this, in a rural idaho, doctors prep a patient for operation. They made a tiny incision on the patient and inserted a tiny robot in the patient( ya, they inserted a robot in the patient) but that not all yet, it about to get a lot mord crazy.
While several miles across the country a surgeon puts on a virtual reality(VR) headset, grabs the controllers and began operating on the patient(how crazy is that, A doc perfoming an operation to a patient using just a VR headset and a tiny robot 😮😷😨).
While this scene may seem like science fiction now, a Charlestown, Mass.-based startup called Vicarious Surgical is developing the technology to make that vision a reality. The company’s co-founders, Adam Sachs and Sammy Khalifa, have been developing and refining the technology almost since they met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as undergraduates.
“We’ve been working on ways to miniaturize robotics and put all of the motion of surgery into the abdominal cavity,” says Sachs. “If you put all of the motion inside the abdominal cavity you are not confined to motion around the incision sites.” The duo has raised some funding from some top dogs like Bill Gates through his Gates Frontier fund, Khosla Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, AME Cloud Ventures (investment firm from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang), Singularity Holdings investor Neil Devani and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. They are reported to have raised a total of $32 million.
According to Sachs, a number of innovations in robotics has led the company to develop what Sachs calls tiny humanoid robots.
“Picture a very robotic version of two human arms and a human head,” says Sachs. “Two robotic arms that have the same degrees of freedom and proportions of a human arms and a camera that is placed above the shoulders of the robot… it’s a few inches across.”
