RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give
names to everything (even things that did not need them), came
up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these
corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of
Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression
engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of
medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope
of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic
surgery. Robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da
Vinci Surgical System, a device that scales down a surgeon’s
hand movements to let him make tiny incisions. That leads to
less tissue damage, and thus a quicker recovery for patients.
Almost 2,000 da Vincis have been made, and they are used in
about 200,000 operations a year around the world, most commonly
hysterectomies and prostate removals.