Sensor Fusion for Force and Position Calibration of a Motorized Surgical Smart Grasper

Minimally Invasive Surgery lacks tactile feedback that surgeons find useful for finding and diagnosing tissue abnormalities. The goal of this paper is to calibrate sensors of a motorized Smart Grasper surgical instrument to provide accurate force and position measurements. These values serve two functions with the novel calibration hardware. The first is to control the motor of the Grasper to prevent tissue damage. The second is to act as the base upon which future work in multi-modal sensor fusion tissue characterization can be built. Our results show that the Grasper jaw distance is a function of both applied force and motor angle while the force the jaws apply to the tissue can be measured using the internal load cell. All code and data sets used to generate this paper can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/Yana-Sosnovskaya/Smart_Grasper_public\