Development of a 2-DOF Sensorized Surgical Grasper for Grasping and Axial Force Measurements

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been limited from its inception by insufficient haptic feedback to surgeons. To address this, various force sensing methods have been developed that can provide information about tool-tissue interaction forces. However, the results have been unreliable in most of these studies, since there are many sources of error and uncertainty in the force acquisition method. Furthermore, none of the force sensing devices described in the literature can be fully cleaned or sterilized for use in surgery. To address this, a sterilizable needle-driver type grasper is presented in this paper that incorporates fiber Bragg gratings to measure axial and grasping forces. The results of its performance evaluation show that the two-degrees of freedom grasper is capable of measuring grasping and axial forces with an accuracy of 0.27 and 0.3 N, respectively. Integration of this device into a needle driver instrument will result in a sterilizable instrument capable of measuring tool-tissue interaction forces during MIS.