Medical mechatronics - An application to haptic forceps

In this paper, a medical forceps system with tactile and force feedback ability desired by surgical robots is developed. Bilateral teleoperation systems can decompose into the common and the differential modes in acceleration based controller. The force servoing is attained in the common mode and the position error is regulated in the differential mode. In order to consider the conformity of force with position, the force servoing and the position regulator are integrated in the acceleration. The acceleration based controller is realized by using the disturbance observer. The disturbance observer makes a motion system to be an acceleration control system. In this paper, two evaluation indices of bilateral teleoperation are defined by analyzing 4ch matrix; "reproducibility" and "operationality". The forceps realizes wide frequency response for high force reproducibility. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed design and analysis methods.