This Guy Built a Da Vinci-Style Surgical Robot

Have you seen those videos that show a surgeon peeling a grape using a surgical robot? They’re pretty incredible are only possible because Da Vinci’s surgical robots cost millions of dollars. Not even YouTube’s most successful makers can afford that. But ChargedHex could afford a used Da Vinci manipulator, so he used it to build his own surgical robot.

The tiny little gripper manipulators used by Da Vinci surgical robots are meant to be disposable items, which means old units are essentially garbage. But used examples do end up on eBay, which is where ChargedHex found his. However, that is just the manipulator on an extension arm with actuation interfaces at the base end, leaving ChargedHex with the responsibility to build everything else.

That actuation interface is actually really neat. It has four rotary knobs that pull cables on the end effector. One rotates the whole pincer, one pivots the pincer, one opens and closes one of the pincer “fingers,” and the last opens and closes the other pincer finger.

ChargedHex wants to eventually do hobby grape flaying. But for this video, his goal was just to move a desiccated grape (otherwise known as a “raisin”).

To achieve that, he built a base for the Da Vinci manipulator. It has four servo motors to rotate those four actuator interfaces. Those are controlled with rotary encoders through a Waveshare RP2040-Zero development board, with two software I2C interfaces to supplement the two hardware I2C interfaces.

That proved to be a successful formula and now ChargedHex can move a raisin an inch or so. He doesn’t yet have anything to move the base of the manipulator, so it is limited to just what the tiny pincer can reach. Still, that is progress towards full-on grape surgery.