Soft Magnetic-Actuation-Based Haptic Interface for a Robot-Assisted Vascular Interventional System: A Feasibility Study

As a promising alternative for minimally invasive vascular surgery, robot-assisted vascular interventional system (VIS) has expressed considerable benefits in preventing radiation, decreasing workload for surgeons, improving surgical environment, and reducing postoperative risk for patients. However, the existing robotic VISs ignore to employ proper haptic feedback for robot-assisted surgery owing to the short of flexible and controllable capabilities of haptic perception. In this work, we develop a dual-instrument operating robotic VIS to manipulate guidewire and catheter, which is capable for multi-instrument surgical tasks. Most importantly, a soft magnetic-actuation-based haptic interface, a prospective solution for haptic sensing based on flexible combination of soft material and magnetic material, is proposed to provide adjustable haptic information for operators. Moreover, a safety operation strategy based on the proposed haptic interface is designed to ensure a safer operating environment for interaction between master side and slave side. Four kinds of experiments are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of soft magnetic-actuation-based haptic feedback and evaluate the tracking performance and operating performance of developed robot-assisted VIS. Results prove the engineering feasibility (haptic sensing range: 0.01–1.49 N) of the proposed haptic interface and the operating effectiveness of developed robot-assisted VIS (maximum linear error is 1.87 mm). Besides, this effort probably has a potential impact on the implementation of soft haptic feedback, research of multi-instrument device, and improvement of safety operation for robotic systems.