A couple of years ago, the Willow Garage robotics company gave ten of its PR2 robots away to deserving research groups. The idea behind the project was that these groups would use the PR2s for robotics research, then share their discoveries with each other, thus advancing the field farther than would be possible if they each had to build their own unique robots from scratch. Now, a similar but unrelated project is underway, and this time the robots are designed specifically to perform surgery.
The National Science Foundation-funded project involves seven identical Raven II surgical robots, which were designed in a joint effort between the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the end of this month, five of the robots will be shipped from UW to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. The other two robots will remain at UW and UC Santa Cruz.
via gizmag
January 13, 2012
