Tactile sensor for enhanced user interaction

• Main Author: Yong, Yoon Keat.
• Other Authors: Seet Gim Lee, Gerald
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Surgical assistive technology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54182
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Surgeons rely greatly on their hands especially sense of touch to obtain important information of their patient’s body during surgery. Information such as the hardness and texture of the body tissues are needed so that the surgeons are able to gauge the force when using the surgical instruments without damaging the body tissues during surgery. Robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery has replace surgeons’ hands with special robotic instruments which has brought more benefit to the patient than conventional surgery. However it has taken away the sense of touch of the surgeon, hence increasing the risk of robotic surgery. Studies have shown that vision feedback itself is not sufficient to ensure the accuracy and safety of the surgery. Therefore tactile feedback has to be introduced to restore the sense of touch to the surgeons. One way to introduce tactile feedback is to apply force feedback on the fingers of the surgeon, allowing they know how hard they are holding the tissues so that the tissues are not damaged. Another way of doing it is to detect slip before it occurs, allowing the surgeons to react to partial slip and hold on to the surgical instruments to avoid slippage of body tissues. The grasping motion of the tissues includes pinching and pulling whereby the tissue could slip if not grasped properly. The objective of this project is to design and fabricate a tactile device that could simulate the finger grasping motion and generate force feedback as well as detecting slip before it happens. A single DOF master haptic device was designed, fabricated and evaluated in a master slave control system to show the feasibility of the approach.