Impedance Matching Approach for Robust Force Feedback Rendering with Application in Robot-assisted Interventions

Robust and accurate force feedback is a clinical need for enhancing the safety of remote robot-assisted interventional procedures. In this study, an impedance-based force feedback approach was proposed and validated. Initially a fast impedance identification method for estimating the impedance of catheter-vasculature interaction at the slave module of such systems was obtained. Afterward, a force feedback approach based on matching the mechanical impedance of the master module with the identified impedance was implemented. The proposed force control method was experimentally studied for a robot-assisted remote catheter insertion task. Also, the performance of the proposed method was experimentally compared to the conventional direct force reflection approach. The proposed force feedback method exhibited fair accuracy in force tracking (mean-absolute error of 0.046 ± 0.027 N). The proposed method outperformed the direct force reflection approach in the absence and presence of communication interruptions (0.052N vs. 0.061N) and (0.041N vs. 0.171N), respectively. The proposed force feedback method exhibited favorable robustness and accuracy for remote interventional applications.