Paper Info
Title
Bio-inspired tactile sensor sleeve for surgical soft manipulators
Abstract
Robotic manipulators for Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) pass through small incisions into the patient's body and interact with soft internal organs. The performance of traditional robotic manipulators such as the da Vinci Robotic System is limited due to insufficient flexibility of the manipulator and lack of haptic feedback. Modern surgical manipulators have taken inspiration from biology e.g. snakes or the octopus. In order for such soft and flexible arms to reconfigure itself and to control its pose with respect to organs as well as to provide haptic feedback to the surgeon, tactile sensors can be integrated with the robot's flexible structure. The work presented here takes inspiration from another area of biology: cucumber tendrils have shown to be ideal tactile sensors for the plant that they are associated with providing useful environmental information during the plant's growth. Incorporating the sensing principles of cucumber tendrils, we have created miniature sensing elements that can be distributed across the surface of soft manipulators to form a sensor network capable of acquire tactile information. Each sensing element is a retractable hemispherical tactile measuring applied pressure. The actual sensing principle chosen for each tactile makes use of optic fibres that transfer light signals modulated by the applied pressure from the sensing element to the proximal end of the robot arm. In this paper, we describe the design and structure of the sensor system, the results of an analysis using Finite Element Modeling in ABAQUS as well as sensor calibration and experimental results. Due to the simple structure of the proposed tactile sensor element, it is miniaturisable and suitable for MIS. An important contribution of this work is that the developed sensor system can be ”loosely” integrated with a soft arm effectively operating independently of the arm and without affecting the arm's motion during bending or elongati- n.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907043
ICRA
Keywords
Field
DocType
medical robotics,surgical soft manipulators,bioinspired tactile sensor sleeve,finite element modeling,miniature sensing elements,haptic feedback,finite element analysis,abaqus,tactile sensors,robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery,force feedback,manipulators,sensor system,rmis,medical computing,robotic manipulators,surgery,sensor calibration
Robotic arm,Control theory,Control engineering,Finite element method,Sensor system,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Robot,Wireless sensor network,Robotics,Haptic technology,Tactile sensor
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2014
1
1050-4729
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.88
21
Authors
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sina Sareh1203.04
Allen Jiang2181.85
Angela Faragasso3586.66
Yohan Noh411315.61
Thrishantha Nanayakkara528935.59
Prokar Dasgupta615616.44
Lakmal D. Seneviratne757770.91
Helge A. Wurdemann815111.63
Kaspar Althoefer9847112.87