The Next level for open source

from ACM.org

Open-Source Surgical Robot Fuels University Research
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That is why researchers have developed a new, open source robot — said to be the first of its kind — that is now facilitating robotic laparoscopic surgery research at seven different U.S. universities.

The universities are Harvard; Johns Hopkins; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC); and University of Washington (UW).

Funded with a $1.1 million grant by the National Science Foundation, the Raven II External Link's software supports the Robot Operating System External Link, an open source robotics coding platform. Two sets of arms and two cameras allow collaborative surgery between a primary and an assistant surgeon [see video ].

"The universities that are now using our robot are free to change the hardware and software in any way they would like and they retain the related IP [intellectual property]. If they would like to license that IP, that's fine," says Jacob Rosen, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz and one of Raven II's creators. "Their only obligation is to share the new code they've made with the rest of the community on the wiki site we've created in addition to our developer's blog