Medrobotics Brand Guidelines: A Carnegie Mellon Flexible Robot and a 2024 Asset Auction

A university robot becomes a company.

Medrobotics was a surgical robotics company in Raynham, Massachusetts. US Food and Drug Administration records list its formal name as Medrobotics Corporation and give a Raynham address for its regulatory filings. Its robot, the Flex Robotic System, was pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the medical trade journal HospiMedica reported in August 2015. The firm no longer trades: in 2024 its plant, its robots and its intellectual property were put up for sale and auctioned, as set out below.

In the period covered by the trade press, the company was led by Samuel Straface, named as president and chief executive by HospiMedica in 2015 and as chief executive in 2016. It also had a medical advisory board; in 2015 its co-chair was the surgeon Eugene Myers, who told HospiMedica he had been a surgeon since 1960 and called the Flex system “one of the most significant operating room advances” he had seen in decades. Those are his words, quoted at launch, not an independent assessment.

The first regulatory step came in 2015. FDA records show a 510(k) filing for the Medrobotics Flex System, received in March 2015 and found substantially equivalent to existing devices in July 2015, reviewed by the ear, nose and throat panel. HospiMedica reported the clearance in August 2015 for transoral procedures — operations performed through the mouth — in the oropharynx, hypopharynx and larynx, the regions of the throat behind the mouth and around the voice box.

A scope that bends, then holds.

The Flex system took a different route from robots with several straight arms. As HospiMedica described it in 2015, a flexible scope “snakes its way” to the surgical site; once the surgeon reaches the desired vantage point, the scope turns rigid and forms a stable platform. An on-board high-definition video system gives the surgeon a view of the site, and a range of flexible, “wristed” 3-millimetre instruments passes alongside to work in confined spaces. The system could be used on its own or with an adjustable Flex Retractor, which the company also made.

Straface told the journal that it was “the first and only robot-assisted surgical platform with a flexible scope cleared by FDA for use during transoral procedures.” That was the company’s claim at the time. Myers added that with the device the surgeon stays close to the patient throughout the operation.

The company then moved into a second field. In November 2016 HospiMedica reported that the Flex Robotic System and Retractor had received the European CE mark for colorectal procedures, in addition to transoral surgery; the journal described the scope as travelling through the body’s natural twists and turns. Straface said the colorectal approval turned the robot into a platform that several hospital departments could use, and linked it to surgery through the body’s natural openings. In the United States, FDA records show a further 510(k) for the Medrobotics Flex Robotic System, received on 5 July 2017 and cleared on 3 August 2017, classed with colonoscopes and reviewed by the gastroenterology and urology panel.

A later model followed. Sale notices in 2024 refer to the Flex360 as the company’s next-generation system, alongside the original Flex.

How the category presents itself.

Surgical robotics companies sell machines that most people will never see in use, so their public image is built from a small set of scenes. The commonest is the operating theatre itself: robot arms draped and angled over a table, a console set a few steps away, and a surgical team in scrubs around them. When the BBC reported a new British surgical robot in 2018, one of its pictures showed a surgeon steering a robot from a console.

The second scene is the surgeon’s own view. Many systems give the surgeon a 3D screen or viewer and hand controls, and company photographs often show a surgeon leaning into that viewer or working the controls, sometimes beside a screen showing the magnified view inside the body. Close-ups of instruments follow: slim shafts, small jaws and wristed tips that bend and turn, shown at a scale no visitor to a hospital would normally see.

Clean product renders do much of the remaining work. Arms, carts and consoles are shown against plain white or soft grey grounds, with a restrained palette of whites, greys and a single brand colour, so that the machine reads as precise and calm. Museums have started to collect the results; in 2023 the Science Museum in London put a surgical robot arm on show in its Engineers gallery.

The industry meets at its own congresses. In North America, the annual meeting of SAGES, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, is a regular venue for new systems; in Europe there is the annual congress of the EAES, the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery; and in London the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics brings engineers and surgeons together. The companies in this guide range from established makers to closed ventures, and each guide sets out what can be checked about them.

A plant offered whole, then lot by lot.

The company’s end was public. On 7 May 2024 the asset-disposal firms Tiger Group and Liquidity Services announced that all the assets of Medrobotics’ fully furnished, 40,000-square-foot plant in Raynham were available in a turnkey sale. The offer included the company’s intellectual property — described as 22 terabytes of technical specifications, customer lists and other material — and 23 complete Flex and Flex360 robotic systems, together with laboratory, manufacturing and plant equipment and a clean room. Tiger Group described Medrobotics as a maker of robotic surgical platforms used by nearly 30 hospitals around the world.

On 29 May 2024 a further notice, republished by the Secured Finance Network, said that all of more than 700 Medrobotics lots, intellectual property included, were now being offered individually, in a timed online auction that closed on 11 June 2024. Besides the robots, the lots ran from 3D printers, laser welders and lathes to operating-room carts, training suites and the furniture and computers of the executive offices. The Raynham building itself was offered as available real estate.

The sale of everything from its robots to its office furniture ended Medrobotics as a working company, and the brand survives only in the record: the trade-press reports of 2015 and 2016, the FDA’s clearances of 2015 and 2017, and the sale notices of 2024. Its story runs from research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, through two US clearances and a European approval for a second field of surgery, to an auction of its Raynham plant lot by lot.

Its names were plain and descriptive: the company called itself Medrobotics, and its products Flex and, later, Flex360, with the Flex Retractor alongside.

For a design guide, Medrobotics shows how a single engineering idea can carry a brand name, and how quickly that brand can disappear when the company behind it closes. Compare CMR Surgical, another company built around one surgical robot, and Intuitive, the maker of the da Vinci system. For this guide we use a slate blue, a pale mist and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Medrobotics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.