A Survey of Force Sensing and Force Feedback Technology for Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgical System

Force information plays an important role in surgery. It enables the surgeon to feel tissue properties such as tissue stiffness, tumor localization, prevents the surgeon to apply excessive force to normal tissues, and allows him or her to commit appropriate force control actions in precise manipulation. Though existing RMIS system (robot-assisted minimally invasive surgical system) overcomes many limitations of MIS (minimally invasive surgery) techniques and provides surgeon with great help, the surgeon loses the interaction between the surgical instrument and tissue, which may lead to increasing of tissue trauma or damage. In order to restore the force information to the surgeon, researchers have applied various force sensing methods and force feedback techniques (including resistance-based sensing, optical-fiber-based sensing, displacement-based sensing, actuator-input-based sensing, direct force feedback, and sensory substitution) to provide the force information in RMIS system. This paper reviews and analyzes state-of-the-art in force sensing and force feedback technologies applied in RMIS system, and presents the future work in this subject.