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Raven-I and Raven-II are robotic systems developed to aid research in Surgical Robotics.
Raven's design was developed for endoscopic surgery in which long slender tools are used to access inside the body
with small incisions and minimal scars. Intuitive Surgical Inc has commercialized an endoscopic surgical robot with great success in hospitals worldwide. The Raven system however is more friendly to researchers as it is lower cost, and has completely open source software.
Raven was developed by Prof. Blake Hannaford and Prof. Jacob Rosen at the Biorobotics Lab of the University of Washington.
- Raven began in about 2001 with submission of a proposal from the University of Washington to the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command for funding.
- Work began in early 2002
- 2005: Field demonstrations in Desert (US Army Sponsored HAPSMRT project).
- 2006: Underwater Habitat Field Experiment (Project Neemo)
- 2010: UW Began a project supported by the US National Science Foundation to build 8 Raven-II systems for US-based researchers.
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2011: Raven-II Software was integrated with the the Robot Operating System "ROS"
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2012: the University of Washington spun out Applied Dexterity to manufacture, sell, and support the Raven-II.
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2013: Raven-II played a role in the movie Ender's Game (see minute 58).
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2016: Raven-II played a role in the short lived NBC series Heartbeat
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2016: University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University began a NSF-funded project to improve the Raven software base and to unify its API with daVinci Research Kit.
- US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (Raven-I)
- US National Science Foundation (Raven-II)
The 120 mm wide base is narrow enough to support two Raven-IIs mounted on either side of the surgery site, allowing for a total of up to four Raven-II arms to be applied to a single surgical field. The Raven-II system is compatible with a host of surgical tools, including a grasper designed by Manuel Moreyra (U.S. Patent #6 969 385). The grasper has 4 degrees of freedom (wrist roll, wrist yaw, and finger pitch times two fingers) and is 10 mm in diameter.
The key features of the Raven system are as follows.
- Two seven-axis spherical manipulators with a remote motion center and 10-mm wristed instruments with compact drive mechanisms and interchangeable instruments.
- Open hardware interfaces.
- 1000-Hz real-time control software distributed under the LGPL license.
- PLC-based safety processor for robust experimental (but not clinical) use.
- Integration with the ROS open source robotic control library for easy interfacing with robotics software and programming models.
- Open TCP/IP interface between the user interface and robot, logging, and access to all control signals.
- A community of research groups using the Raven.
The Raven-II software is completely open sourced and can be found on the uw-biorobotics gitHub page. For more understanding of the code hierarchy, there is a Doxygen page of Raven-II software documentations. Several essential files in the Raven-II software are drafted as comprehensible flowcharts, which can be found here.
Recently, we also developed a coding style guide for future implementations or extended software working with Raven-II. Although most of the Raven code was developed before determining a style guide and therefore are not entirely congruent with the guidlines specified in this repository, we now advise all new files follow the conventions. And updating the old files is a work in progress.
The Raven-II software is constantly updating for new features and bug fixes, the lastest software release was 16.10. All users from the Raven Community should get a notification email from Andrew Lewis from Applied Dexterity once there is a new release, and will be able to download the most current code from the gitHub page. Finally, the RAVEN User guide is an instruction for using, maintaining, and troubleshooting the Raven robotic system. Finally, a YouTube video playlist is created to walk people through how a new user can get started working with Raven-II from the basic to the more advanced level.
As one of the most popular robotic surgery research platform, Raven robots dwell in 18 institutes now, and 2 more are joinning in spring 2018. The 18 Raven sites are:
- BioRobotics Laboratory (PI: Blake Hannaford) – University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Bionics Lab (PI: Jacob Rosen) – University of California Los Angeles
- Harvard Biorobotics Lab (PI: Robert D. Howe) – Harvard University
- Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab (PI: Gregory D. Hager,) – Johns Hopkins University
- Robotics and Mechatronics Lab (PI: Shane Farritor?) – University of Nebraska
- Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology (CASIT) – University of California Los Angeles
- Berkeley Laboratory for Automation Science and Engineering (PI: Ken Goldberg) – University of California Berkeley
- CHARM: Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (PI: Allison Okamura) – Stanford University
- Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics – University of Montpellier, France
- Robotics Laboratory (PI: Zhihua Qu?) – University of Central Florida
- CSTAR: Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (PI: R.V. Patel) – University of Western Ontario
- Center for Bionics – Korea Institute of Science and Technology
- Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery (PI: Guang-Zhong Yang) – Imperial College London
- Biomedical Robotics Lab (PI: Ilana Nisky) – Ben Gurion University
- Cognitive and Applied Robotics (CARO) group – Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute – University of Southern Denmark
- Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (CRIM) (PI: Yuan Jiahu) – Chongqing Institute for Green and Intelligent Technology
- Coordinated Science Lab (CSL) – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- WWAMI Institute for Simulation in Healthcare (WISH) – University of Washington Medical School
In 2012, Patents and intellectual property for Raven-I and Raven-II were licensed to a newly formed spin-out company, Applied Dexterity Inc, by the University of Washington.