Sensors and Devices to Enhance the Performances of a Minimally Invasive Surgery Tool for Replicating Surgeon's Haptic Perception of the Manipulated Tissues

Minimally invasive surgery is afflicted with important limits related to tactile uncoupling between the surgeon's hand and the tissues manipulated by surgical tool. Our work suggests a solution for this problem. We designed a sensorization system in order to acquire information about the force exerted on the tissues and the deformation induced. We elaborated these information through an identification algorithm to extract typical materials parameters. We applied a control law using evaluated parameters for replicating rheological dynamic behaviour of surgical tissues by means of a tactile display. In this paper we describe the functioning of the sensor and devices utilized, and the experimental results.