Multifunctional Robotic Surgical Forceps With Tactile Sensor Array for Tissue Palpation and Clamping Status Detection

Compared with traditional open surgery, robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) has the significant advantages of smaller incisions, less bleeding, and faster recovery, and has been widely used in the field of surgery. However, existing robot-assisted surgical systems usually suffer from limited motion space and the lack of tactile sensing, which prevent them from correctly evaluating the interaction between surgical instruments and organs during surgery. Applying insufficient or excessive force to surgical instruments may result in failure of the surgical operation or organ damage. Therefore, in this article, a multifunctional robot-assisted surgical forceps with a tactile sensor array is designed, which can be used as a palpation probe and a clamping forceps at the same time. Tactile sensor arrays each containing 32 sensor units are integrated on the upper and lower gripping surfaces of the forceps. The sensor is based on the principle of capacitive sensing with pole pitch variation. Each sensor unit has an area of only 1 mm2, which has an accuracy of 0.1 MPa in the measurement range of 0–3 MPa. Finally, the multifunctional forceps are used to perform tumor palpation detection experiments as a probe and suture needle clamping detection experiments as the forceps to verify the feasibility of these forceps in minimally invasive surgery.