A Study on Force Measurement for Microsurgery Robots

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of force feedback in robotics-assisted microsurgeries. Since it is difficult to install tiny force sensors on micro surgical tools, a novel approach for estimating force vector from the deformation of the surgical tool is proposed. In the proposed approach, a surgical instrument that deforms according to the magnitude of the tool-to-tissue force is designed and machine learning is applied to make the nonlinear relationship between the deformation of surgical tool and the applied forces, so that the tool-to-tissue force can be estimated according to the deformation of the surgical instrument in actual use. The experimental results prove that the method can successfully estimate the applied force with high accuracy from the three-dimensional.