Achievement of real haptic sensation with tendon driven segregated jaws for laparoscopic forceps

Abstract

As the technology advances, almost all the fields of the society gets developed for the benefit of the mankind. Surgery is one such field where a lot of focus is made to develop the surgical tools and instruments for past couple of decades. As a result, the robot assisted minimal invasive surgeries are very popular in the modern world. Laparoscopic forceps robots are widely used in these types of surgeries. Most of these forceps robots can only be position controlled where the user cannot feel the environment. However in surgeries it is necessary to feel the stiffness of the tissues. Therefore the transmission of force sensation is required. Especially in the case of a remote operation, bilateral control is essential. Also, most of the forceps robots are manufactured according to the traditional forceps mechanism with a crank arrangement at the tip of the forceps. This mechanism restricts the independent move of the two jaws and transmits the force in a single mechanical channel to the user. This paper proposes a method to operate the forceps tip independently with the use of bilaterally controlled tendon arrangement. Also at the same time it linearizes the force applied by the forceps tip to the object. Experimental results confirm the validity of the proposed method.