Force Sensor Integrated Surgical Forceps for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery

TLDR

The study introduces a novel surgical instrument equipped with a four‑degree‑of‑freedom force sensor for robotic minimally invasive surgery, designed to be compatible with the open‑source Raven‑II platform. The instrument employs capacitive transduction with four embedded transducers and analog signal processing to directly measure normal, shear, pulling, and grasping forces, enabling haptic feedback control. Experimental validation on the Raven‑II, using a reference force sensor, confirmed the accuracy of the four‑DOF sensing system.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel surgical instrument integrated with a four-degree-of-freedom (DOF) force sensor. By adopting the capacitive transduction principle, the sensor enables the direct sensing of normal and shear forces at surgical instrument tips. Thus, three-DOF pulling forces and a single-DOF grasping force can be measured for haptic feedback control of robotic minimally invasive surgery systems. The sensor consists of four capacitive transducers, and all the transducers including analog signal processing units are embedded in small surgical instrument tips. The four-DOF force sensing is enabled thanks to the four capacitive transducers by using the force transformation method. In this study, the instrument is designed and manufactured to be adaptable to the open-source surgical robot platform, called Raven-II. In addition, the sensing system is experimentally validated through its application to the Raven-II by using a reference force sensor.