Surgical Robotics Healthcare and Purpose with J&J's Martin Buehler

Hello Everyone and welcome to this edition of The Robot Industry Podcast #112 with Johnson and Johnson's Martin Buehler. Martin Buehler is Global Head of Robotics R&D for Johnson & Johnson MedTech. He is responsible for leading the end-to-end development for the MONARCH and OTTAVA robotics platforms, as well as strategy and innovation cadence across surgical robotics for MedTech. Buehler shapes and drives the innovation strategy for R&D teams across hardware and software and advances a collective vision and tactical program to make medical intervention smarter, less invasive, and more personalized. Buehler has a strong track record of inspirational leadership in technology innovation and a diverse robotics experience across a variety of industry sectors, including medical, industrial, consumer, food, agriculture, logistics, entertainment, and defense. He has technical expertise in the full robotics software and hardware tech stack and the unique ability to lead the design, development and productization of complex, multi-disciplinary systems.  Most recently, Buehler was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Wavemaker Labs, a venture studio with startups in food and agriculture. He has held previous senior leadership roles at Creator, Walt Disney Imagineering, Medtronic, Vecna, iRobot, and Boston Dynamics. He served as robotics professor at McGill University for 12 years, where he held a tenured position. His 130 peer-reviewed publications have been cited over 10,000 times. For his academic and industrial contributions and leadership in robotics, Buehler was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is a recipient of The Joseph F. Engelberger Award in Technology, one of the most prestigious awards in robotics. Buehler holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University and completed his postdoctoral work in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at M.I.T. You and I have met before at the Forum in Orlando when you were with Walt Disney Imagineering group, so it is my pleasure to have you here today, welcome to the podcast! So you've told me that you are happy to be back in the healthcare industry with robotics. Why is that and what do you find compelling? You have called this sector a "rich landscape." Can you talk a bit about what you mean by that? How important is leadership to your role in developing these complex systems? Part of your job is leading your teams, your suppliers, commercial groups at J&J, physicians, and planning for patient outcomes. How do you balance all of these often likely competing priorities? You specified in a recent LinkedIn post that Monarch is a urology platform. Can it be used for other areas of the body? What about diseases such as lung cancer? Can you talk about how you’re realizing the future of medicine by being able to inject reactive agents or oncolytic virus into the tumor? Since this robot is a diagnostic tool paired with a treatment platform, it reduces the number of times that a patient has to have a procedure or surgery—is that correct? Digital is a big part of your life -- especially in medicine -- and it is hard to have robots without digital. How is digital changing the game? We have lots of challenges when it comes to connectivity to the cloud, big ecosystem connectivity, robots to instruments, robot to robot. How is this changing? Johnson & Johnson’s CEO has said that there will be more changes in the next ten years than have taken place in the last 100 years in medicine. How will robotics play a role in this? You are a big fan of the startups in this field. What are your...