External Force Estimation of Impedance-Type Driven Mechanism for Surgical Robot with Kalman Filter

Haptic feedback has been proved the importance in the surgical robot system, however, such function is missing in current commercially available minimally invasive surgical robot system. To address this issue, many surgical forceps have been designed and developed to provide the sense of contact forces to the surgeon during surgical manipulation. However, to data, there are no commercially available surgical forceps with haptic perception because of the disadvantages of such physical-sensing devices. No matter what sensing algorithm it utilized, there are always physical constraints related to the force sensors. This study presents concepts and application of a Kalman filter for the control of robot handle force during contact with the external environment. The external contact force in the system was estimated by parameter estimation techniques to the robot actuators. The method is described and its effectiveness is shown for a one degree-of-freedom robot.