🧠 Overview

This project started with a conversation. A close friend of mine, then a surgical resident, described how manipulating an endoscope during abdominal procedures often required an extra set of hands, breaking concentration and slowing down the primary operation. He wondered aloud: what if a surgeon could just control the scope with something as intuitive as a PlayStation controller?

That question stuck with me. As my skills in robotics and embedded systems matured through grad school, I eventually returned to the idea and decided to build a fully functional robotic endoscope controller from scratch—one that could be operated in real time by a single user in a simulated surgical setting.

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🎯 Objectives

The goal was to prototype a system that could:

• Rotate all four angulation knobs of a standard laparoscopic endoscope,
• Actuate vacuum and irrigation buttons,
• Be controlled in real time using a PS2 game controller, and
• Be physically robust and compact enough to test in a surgical simulation environment.

I wanted to own the entire stack—from mechanical design to embedded firmware—and build something that could one day be tested in a real surgical workflow.

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⚙️ What I Built

• Observational Research:
  • Shadowed sessions in a surgical simulation lab.
  • Took physical measurements of the endoscope using calipers to inform design.
• Mechanical Design & Fabrication:
  • Designed a custom thrust-bearing system to rotate all four angulation knobs via stepper motors.
  • Created a 3-stage 3D-printed gear train (1:180 reduction) to boost torque at the main shaft.
  • Integrated two linear actuators to replicate vacuum and irrigation button presses.
  • Milled and lathed 17 custom aluminum and steel components; all parts modeled in SolidWorks.
• Electronics & Embedded Firmware:
  • Used a PIC32 microcontroller to coordinate all actuators.
  • Implemented a finite state machine to manage system modes and transitions.
  • Developed a bare-metal PS2 controller driver and mapped analog stick displacement to motor velocity in real time.
• System Integration:
  • Brought together mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems into a cohesive, fully functioning prototype.

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✅ Outcome

Although the system was not tested on a real endoscope due to last-stage mechanical interface limitations, the working prototype achieved the project’s major goals:

• All degrees of motion could be intuitively controlled in real time with a PS2 controller.
• The system proved the feasibility of replacing a multi-person endoscope workflow with a single-user robotic solution.
• I gained end-to-end experience building a complex mechatronic system under realistic constraints—across mechanical engineering, electronics design, embedded firmware, and user interface.

This project shaped the direction of my graduate studies and gave me the confidence to pursue full-stack engineering problems in applied robotics and medical devices. It remains one of the most complete and ambitious electromechanical systems I’ve built from scratch.

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