About Me
Hello! I’m Ryan Fish, a roboticist from New England. I grew up in rural Maine and it was only thanks to the Internet that I could learn about technology, electronics, and robotics. At least until my middle school got a Lego Robotics program… I was hooked!
Since then, my professional/technical life has been centered on making intelligent things happen in the real, physical world. In undergrad at MIT, I worked on a bicycle that would give haptic feedback to a blind rider to guide them through the world safely. In grad school, my thesis was developing a robotic platform for autonomous pipeline inspection
From 2017 to 2026, I had the thrill of pushing an incredible surgical robotic system from garage prototype to live porcine studies over the course of 9 years with Vicarious Surgical. A true journey, with all the trials and tribulations imagineable for a small company that scaled 10x, went public, then overshot it’s MVP and petered out amidst the insatiable demand for capital in the AI economy.
Now, I’m searching for the next company to help build with a lot of experience under my belt. If that’s you, reach out! Socials in the site footer. I’d love to hear about what robots you are dreaming of, medical or not.
The other half of my existence is dedicated to my partner, my family, my hilarious Husky, and the side-quests we’ve made along the way. Sometimes it’s driving 3,500 miles from Los Angeles to Anchorage in the middle of winter so our Husky can see his people. Other times its growing 10 apple trees to make homemade sweet and hard cider from heritage varietals.
If you’re still not sure about me, check out my CV below:
Publications
- "Virtual" diametric magnet for position sensing with smaller, distributed magnets. See especially Fig 32.
- "Virtual Surgeon" comprised of a "head", left-, and right-arm that are all inserted through a single, minimum-sized incision. See especially Figs 11-23 and 46.
- Introduction of thrust-vectoring ailerons for non-holonomic 6DoF controllability
- Design and Implementation of full control platform (logic, comms, power electronics, log storage) for self-contained, battery-powered operation.
- Design and Implementation of FreeRTOS-based application to manage real-time control, drive peripherals, and allow future work to implement mapping and other long-horizon tasks.
- Designed new LIDAR sensing modality for improved obstacle detection.
- Implemented LCM-based IPC for efficient communication between custom drivers, logic, and image processing.
- Upgraded vision system to stereoscopic, global-shutter, forward facing cameras for predictive planning.
- Implemented basic lane-detection and 2D motion model to improve human-in-the-loop navigation guidance.
Experience
- Led system requirements architecture for multiple high-impact features, including motion/dynamic performance of manipulators, reliability testing of disposable subsystems, and unintended tissue contact prevention.
- Performed RCA on multiple critical issues, including leveraging E&M simulation in COMSOL to predict effective shielding thickness necessary to eliminate ferromagnetic saturation of a key sensor.
- Lead developer/designer on Instrument calibration fixture and associated software. Designed novel kinematic profile for determining joint offsets with very low cross-coupling based on vision system tracking of end-effector.
- Led integration of LLM-enabled enterprise search in org. Iterated use cases for synthesizing requirements and other critical documentation to leverage large institutional dataset with missing SMEs.
- Worked with leadership to identify new product opportunities, developed business briefs with clinical input, and green-lit a proposed system extension product to enable a wide array of new instrumentation.
- Designed and built electromechanical prototype to be used as proof-of-concept for initial user testing and user needs/system requirements development.
- Trialed novel manufacturing pipeline using nearly exclusively 3DP components to vastly accelerate part production compared with subtractive manufacturing techniques. Although non-isotropic material properties stalled the 3DP manufacturing process, the new assembly methods and internal structures endured for conversion to molding processes.
- Led multi-disciplinary team on development of 8-DOF intra-abdominal manipulator arm. It was these hardware builds and demos that led to going public as RBOT.
- Designed novel magnetic sensor (Hall-effect) arrangement to improve miniaturization, strength, and motion-decoupling of "elbow" style joints. (US Pat. 12,544,145)
- Reduced overall length of arm assembly from ~600mm to 200mm to enable use in a wide range of patient abdomens.
- Developed novel interchangeable tip system with peers to address highest-cost system component.
- Designed interfaces to enable simple manipulation of real-world objects, for final deployment with Robonaut on the International Space Station.
- Coded wrappers for dynamic modeling and control software to manipulate Kinova’s Jaco robotic arm.
Education
- 6.832: Underactuated Robotics - Fall 2015
- 2.737: Mechatronics - Fall 2016
- 2.131: Advanced Instrumentation and Measurement - Spring 2017
- Lab TA for 2.12: Introduction to Robotics (see Department video below) - Fall 2016
- 16.35: Real-Time Systems and Software - Spring 2015
- 2.153: Adaptive Control - Spring 2015
- 2.151: Advanced System Dynamics & Control - Fall 2014
- 2.009: Product Engineering Processes (See final project video below - I worked on embedded design) - Fall 2014