Medtronic Senior Engineering Director of Surgical Robotics Bill Peine [Photo courtesy of Medtronic]
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
Medtronic Senior Engineering Director of Surgical Robotics Bill Peine
Peine offered a window into the development process for the Hugo robot-assisted surgery system: “We had a very clear definition of what a surgical robot was. But, how do you build one yourself? The way we did it was, we assembled the right team,” Peine explained. “A surgical robot is multidisciplinary. You have to get your architecture right, there’s a lot of mechanical and electrical design, but human factors and the user interfaces are just as critical and important.” Medtronic employed a “spiral development” process with repeated cycles of quick prototyping and customer evaluation, he said. “Most importantly, the engineering team loved this,” Peine said. “It was so much fun for them because they got to do something quick, and they were participating, getting that market feedback from customers. The R&D team has partnered very closely with the marketing team, so it was fast-paced, and at the end of a cycle, all the different subsystems would integrate their products or their individual parts into the working system.”
Read more: Medtronic’s development process for its Hugo RAS system
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