Study for the Indirect Measuring Method of Operational Force in Surgical Robot Instrument

This paper proposes the method indirectly measuring the operating force of the end-effect tip of surgical robot instrument which conducts the surgical operation in the body on behalf of the surgeon`s hand. Due to the size and safety obligation to the surgical robot instrument, it is difficult to measure the operation force of its tip like grasping force. However the instrument is driven by cable-pulley torque transmission mechanism and when some force is occurred at the tip, then the reaction force appears on the cable as additional tension. Based on this phenomenon, this paper proposes a method to estimate the operating force from measuring reaction force against the driving motor by using a loadcell. And it induces mathematical equation to calculate the force from loadcell by approaching the modulus of elasticity to high order polynomial. And this paper proves the validity of proposed mechanism by experimental test.