Development of 4-DOFs forceps with force sensing using pneumatic servo system

In the teleoperated minimally invasive surgery systems, measurement and display of sense of force to the operator is a problem. In this paper, we proposed a master-slave system for laparoscopic surgery, which can provide force feedback to the surgeon without using force sensors. Pneumatic cylinders were used as the actuator of the manipulators to achieve this. First, we developed two forceps manipulators to construct a master-slave system which have 4-DOFs at the tip. A bilateral dynamic control system was then designed using a neural network for acquisition of the inverse dynamics. The obtained inverse dynamics was used as a feedforward controller and to estimate the external force from the differential pressure of the cylinders. Experimental results showed that the developed system successfully display the contact force on the slave side to the operator on the master side