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In late 1995 SRI licensed
this technology to Intuitive Surgical, Inc. of Mountain View, CA. Intuitive
Surgical furthered the work begun at SRI by improving on the precise control
of the surgical instruments, adding a new invention, EndoWristô, patented by
company cofounder Frederic Moll, which added two degrees of freedom to the
SRI deviceóinner pitch and inner yaw(Inner pitch is the motion a wrist
performs to knock on a door; inner yaw is the side-to-side movement used in
wiping a table)óallowing the system to better mimic a surgeon's actions; it
gives the robot ability to reach around, beyond and behind delicate body
structures, delivering these angles right at the surgical site. Through
licenses of IBM patents, Intuitive also improved the 3-D video imaging,
navigation and registration of the video image to the spatial frame in which
the robot operates. The system employs 250 megaflops of parallel processing
power.
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