Non-contact Stiffness Sensing by Considering the Change of Fluid Force due to Object Deformation

Abstract

Non-contact stiffness sensor is often utilized especially for medical fields due to its advantage of avoiding damage to tissues and keeping sanitary. However, it is hard to measure the force accurately, because the fluid jet based force much depends upon the shape after deformation of object. This paper proposes an innovative approach where the external force is adaptively calibrated based on the deformation of object so that we can evaluate the internal stiffness parameters more accurately than that of conventional approaches. It is shown that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of force application with even 100% at an extreme case.