Sensorless Haptic Feedback in a Surgical Robot for Telesurgery

In order to regain haptic feedback when utilizing robot-assisted surgical techniques in the telesurgery, various methods have been utilized. Toward this effort, the most widely used method of utilizing sensors to measure the interaction force between tissue and surgical instruments has inherent drawbacks such as increased size and cost due to the additional sensor modules. In this paper, an alternative sensorless method has been proposed to estimate the interaction force for a surgical robot in telesurgery. This novel method utilizes a calculation algorithm based on accurate dynamic modeling of the robot and the relationship between a motor’s current and torque. Employing this algorithm will resume haptic feedback sensorlessly in telesurgery and simplify the robotic structure, thereby reduce the associated costs. This sensorless force estimation method presents an effective haptic feedback approach for general on-board actuated surgical methods or applications. It is still applicative when the master console and the slave robot are built in dissimilar multi-degree-of-freedom architectures. Consequently, this algorithm will significantly usher the revolution of applications in surgical robotic fields.