Surgical Robots To Get Open Source Platform

Surgical Robotics experts at the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz have completed a set of seven identical advanced robotic surgery robots, called Raven II, designed for medical research laboratories.

After final testing, five of the systems will be made available to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, University of California at Berkeley, and University of California at Los Angeles. Two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW. Soon the robots will be flocking to university labs across the United States where researchers will be provided the first common open-source research platform to develop the future of surgical robotics.

Raven II Engineering Team | Mary Levin, UW Photography

Raven is a surgical robot which was developed by Blake Hannaford and Jacob Rosen, an associate professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Latest moderation of the surgical robot, Raven II includes two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. The two mechanical wing-like arms end in tiny gripper claws designed to perform surgery on simulated patients. The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery.

Over providing the surgical robots with an open source platform, Hannaford, the director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at UW said, ”With everyone working on the same platform we can more easily share new developments and innovations.”And Rosen shared, “We decided to follow an open-source model, because if all of these labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery, the whole field will be able to advance more quickly.”

Experts are also making the robot’s software compatible with Robot Operating System, a popular open source robotics coding platform. They are also in the process of developing Raven IV surgical robotics platform with four robotic arms and two cameras to enable collaboration between two surgeons working from separate locations, according to reports.

Here’s the video of Raven II in action,

With open sourcing the platform for medical researches, it is sure that it will impact on the medical fields and has got a huge potential in more med-robots with new techniques and instruments.

Raven II engineering team has been posting developments and updates on the surgical robots on their blog. Check out the team at Raven II Development Blog.