Working at a startup means constant changes, but we’ve been fortunate to have one constant in our lives: our  annual trip to Imperial College London for the Hamlyn Symposium on medical robotics. It’s no coincidence that the Hamlyn Centre was our first RAVEN customer, the Hamlyn Centre is at the heart of surgical robotics innovation in Europe. We’re excited to be attending again this summer and we’re looking forward to catching up with everyone. Let us know if you’ll be attending so that we can make sure to have some goodies for you.

Since our last community update we’ve shipped robots to three more schools! There are a total of 18 RAVEN labs on three continents with a total of more than twenty RAVEN robots. The newest members of our list are the Chongqing Institute for Green and Intelligent Technology (China), the University of Southern Denmark (Odense), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These new sites and many of the established RAVEN sites have been working on all sorts of fascinating new approaches to robotics and surgical applications.

California has the highest concentration of RAVENs followed by Seattle. If your region seems underrepresented, get in touch!

We are pleased to announce that Imperial College London and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) are the two newest members of the RAVEN community. Imperial College London will be using a standard RAVEN II at their Hamlyn Centre under the leadership of Professor Guang-Zhong Yang. Applied Dexterity is participating in a multi-institutional project with KIST and will provide custom RAVEN hardware for the team’s efforts to engineer a next-generation micro-surgical robot based on an open platform. These teams are the latest addition to our overseas community.

For more details, please read the Applied Dexterity Press Release.

All of the parts are in and assembly is well underway on a community sourced addition to the RAVEN system that allows for use of commercially available surgical tools. When these are delivered to many of the members of the RAVEN community in the next few weeks, they will greatly increase the number of tool types available for research. These adapters were enabled by the open tool interface provided to RAVEN users and we look forward to the future innovations that will come out of the highly capable community.

The Applied Dexterity team has set up their booth at ICRA 2013 in Karlsruhe, Germany. We’ve already met a lot of great people, and look forward to meeting more people and robots. If you’re in the area, come see us at booth 245 in the Kongresszentrum!

Quote of the day:

“We need one of these.”