A Novel SEA-based Haptic Interface for Robot-Assisted Vascular Interventional Surgery

Robot-assisted vascular interventional surgery can isolate interventionists and X-ray radiation, and improve surgical accuracy. However, the leader side outside the operating room still has problems such as incomplete collection of operating information and unrealistic tactile feedback. The main objective of this paper is to design a haptic interface that can simultaneously capture the force-position information of the interventionists and generate force to assist the interventionists in performing surgeries on the leader side. It can capture the interventionists’ delivery displacement, twisting angle, clamping force, and provide real-time force feedback. A leader-follower bidirectional force feedback control strategy was proposed. Based on this strategy, on the one hand, the interventionist perceives the multi-modal information fed back from the follower side, makes judgments, and actively adjusts the surgical operation. On the other hand, the interventionist controls the grasping state of the instruments remotely to control the safety operating force threshold. Finally, the experimental setup was built and a series of evaluation experiments were performed. The experimental results verified the feasibility of the designed haptic interface. It can generate dynamic and accurate force feedback and realize leader-follower grasping force control.