Robotic Surgery with Raven II

A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a surgical robot, called Raven II, for use as an open source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard , Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

The Raven II is a surgical robot with 7 degrees of freedom, compact electronics and two wing-like arms which end in tiny gripper claws designed to perform surgery on simulated patients. The robot’s software is compatible with Robot Operating System (ROS), an open source robotics coding platform.

Mary Levin, UW Photography

This open source approach, along with the provision of the Raven II units to the participating schools, aims to accelerate the pace of development of surgical robotics. By saving researchers time and effort in developing their own software control systems and by providing a common hardware research platform, more time can be spent sharing software improvements, replicating experiments and collaborating.


In the video below forward kinematics of Raven II. Kinematics are calculated in the Raven control software, and the resulting cartesian position (position only) is published to ROS as a spherical "marker" object. The RViz visualizer subscribes and displays the marker.

Find out more about the Raven II on their development blog, or read their press release.