天美影视传媒 doctoral student walked upstairs to get coffee on an ordinary spring morning in 2012. , his adviser and a UW electrical engineering professor, was ahead of him in line.

“Did you hear about the Hollywood thing?” Hannaford asked.

King recalls saying, “No, but I’m in.”

Hannaford went on to explain that a director from the movie “Ender’s Game” had contacted the UW to see about using the lab’s on the movie set.

That’s when King almost dropped his coffee.

“‘Ender’s Game’ is one of those iconic sci-fi books,” King explained. “When we got back to the lab and told people, everyone’s jaw collectively dropped.”

The movie “,” starring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield and directed by Gavin Hood, is based on the 1980s military science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. The movie opens Nov. 1 in theaters across the country.

Within a month of getting the call, King and then-UW bioengineering doctoral student Lee White packed up their lab’s surgical robot and flew to New Orleans. The students would be the sole operators of the robot during filming, and they also needed time to prepare its exterior to look less like a lab machine. The students helped to decide how the robot would operate to make it look as realistic as possible, King said.

“We were really part of the creative process of getting the robot on the set,” he said.

Less than a week later, they were filming on the movie set, a New Orleans NASA facility that builds rockets. King and White sat just off-set behind a curtain, where they used several computer monitors and controllers to move the robot’s four arms as it simulated brain surgery on one of the lead characters. The students ran the robot for more than 14 hours, and King still remembers feeling an intense pressure to perform. A day of filming is astronomically expensive, he explained, and each minute on the set counts, especially when producers, actors, directors, movie backers 鈥� and even caterers 鈥� are all keenly watching.

“We were petrified that something would break, that the robot would screw up,” King said. “Everything had to be working perfectly from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on the set.”

At one point, King and White, now a medical student at Stanford University, controlled the robot during a close-up shoot. For several minutes, everyone watched as the students maneuvered the robot’s arms around and behind the actor’s head. King remembers “sweating bullets” and having to ignore swarms of Louisiana mosquitos attacking his legs and arms as he worked.

In a scene around the movie’s 58-minute mark, Bonzo Madrid, one of the main characters who is played by actor Mois茅s Arias, was critically injured and suffered brain trauma after a fight with Ender Wiggin at the battle school. The UW robot simulates opening Bonzo’s skull to operate on his brain. The scene deviates from the book’s plot, King said, and nearly all of the main characters are present.

King and White used a nonverbal signaling system to communicate as they operated the robot in tandem. It takes two people to move all four of the robot’s arms. The robot’s hands and wrists stayed locked in place and out of sight during filming, because those components are unrealistically large to simulate fine-tuned brain surgery. The robot’s hands were hidden behind Arias’ head and the actor held an emergency “off” button to press in case of a close call.

After the close-up shoot and more than 14 hours of operating, nothing broke or malfunctioned.

“At the end of the day, I asked the props director how we did,” King recalls with a laugh. “He said, ‘Let me put it this way, if they didn’t like it, it wouldn’t get a close-up.'”

Hannaford’s lab developed the first Raven surgical robot about 10 years ago after the U.S. Army expressed interest in technology for remote medical care. A next-generation Raven II was built through National Science Foundation funding and collaboration with of University of California, Santa Cruz, and sent to seven research universities, including the UW. This past summer five more universities purchased robots for research. Hannaford and Rosen recently spun out a company called to build future robots.

The Raven robots aren’t yet used in clinics for surgery, but that is the eventual goal, he said. Universities are mainly using them to design and test new hardware and software for tele-surgery procedures. The robots are designed to have state-of-the-art motion control and to fit in a standard operating room. A similar robot called the is currently used to perform minimally invasive procedures such as appendix, gallbladder and ovarian cyst removals.

After a week hanging out with the movie’s props team, exploring New Orleans and even joking around with Harrison Ford, the UW students returned to campus, where they had to stay tight-lipped about their robot’s stardom for more than a year. For King, who plans to graduate this year and has spent his entire doctorate working on the surgical robot, it’s a memorable way to finish his degree.

“It was a really fantastic experience,” he said.

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For more information, contact King at hawkeye1@uw.edu or 206-697-3955, and Hannaford at blake@ee.washington.edu or 206-412-0182.

Soon the robots will be flown to campuses across the country, where they will provide the first common research platform to develop the future of surgical robotics.

Members of the public are invited to view the robots at an open house Friday, Jan. 13, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the UWs Electrical Engineering Building.

After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The other two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and UW.

“With everyone working on the same, open-source platform we can more easily share new developments and innovations,鈥� said UW electrical engineering professor .

While some groups have built their own devices, this slows progress in the field.

“Researchers and funding agencies are tired of one-off robots 鈥� they want to pursue projects that use standardized platforms,鈥� Hannaford said. “This is where the field is going.鈥�

The UW group is making its software work with the , a popular open-source robotics code, so groups can easily connect the Raven to .

The robots were developed by Hannaford and , a former UW faculty member who is now an associate professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

Until now, most research on surgical robotics in the United States has meant creating new software for commercial robots.

“Academic researchers have had limited access to these proprietary systems,鈥� Rosen said. “We are changing that by providing high-quality hardware developed within academia. Each lab will start with an identical, fully operational system, but they can change the hardware and software and share new developments and algorithms, while retaining intellectual property rights for their own innovations.鈥�

A grant from the National Science Foundation paid for the new devices.

The original Raven robot was completed in 2005 and used for UW research on , in which commands are sent over the Internet.

The latest version, the Raven II, has more compact electronics and dexterous hands that can hold wristed surgical tools, like the newest commercial machines. A surgeon sitting at a screen can look through Ravens cameras and guide the instruments to perform a task such as suturing. The system, while not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is precise enough to support research on advanced robotic-surgery techniques.

The new robots were designed and built by Rosens group in Santa Cruz. The UW group built the electronics and software; undergraduates helped wire circuit boards, assemble the electronic components and perform tests.

The hope is that the common, open-source platform will allow research groups to share software, replicate experiments and collaborate. Participating schools specialties include:

• Harvard mechanical engineers working on “beating-heart鈥� surgery, where a robot compensates for the movement of a beating heart so a surgeon can operate as if on a static surface.

• Johns Hopkins computer scientists working on image analysis, superimposing the surgeons field of view on standard medical images.

• UW research on force feedback, using machine intelligence to create barriers around things a surgeon needs to avoid, and attractive force fields around objects the surgeon wants to touch.

All projects are aimed at speeding up procedures, reducing errors and improving patient outcomes.

Four more universities are already in line to get the system. The original Raven robot will move to UW Medicines for use by medical researchers there.

“I see huge potential in surgical robotics for incorporating new instruments, more procedures, allowing for remote surgeries, and doing collaborative surgery between multiple surgeons in different locations,鈥� said collaborator Dr. , a UW associate professor of urology and a pediatric urologist at Seattle Childrens Hospital. “Having everyone working on the same, open-source robot will help to make these happen more quickly.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HenM1i1x6zI

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For more information, contact Hannaford at blake@uw.edu or 206-543-2197, and Rosen at rosen@soe.ucsc.edu or 831-459-5302.

More information is on the groups . Also see the .