Junking the JOYSTICK

摘要

When Russell Taylor first started working on surgical robots in the late 1980s, one of the most cumbersome tasks was aligning the device to the patient's body. The joystick controller used to move the business end of IBM's robotic hip-replacement machine, called Robodoc, to the hip was plenty precise. But trying to move the tip of the instrument through x-y-z coordinates was unnatural.