Design and evaluation of a 1DoF ERF-based needle insertion haptic platform

In the medical field, several surgical simulators and training platforms have been developed to help novice surgeons improve their surgical skills, as well as perform preoperative planning. In this paper, a haptic platform for surgical needle insertion training gestures is presented. Instead of relying on active actuators, an alternative solution, consisting in passive brakes based on Electro-Rheological (ER) fluids, is proposed, to provide a safe and realistic physical feedback to the physician. This platform generates a passive repulsive force against the user´s movement, providing him/her a physical stimulus and, thus, a realistic haptic feedback. The goal of this project is to prove the reliability of ERF-based brakes to simulate the physical resistance of soft tissues against the movement of a surgical needle, in order to train unskilled practitioners in different scenarios. To achieve this objective, a prototype has been built, its kinematic model has been obtained and experimentally validated. The modelling, the bandwidth analysis and the force control scheme of the platform are also presented.