Development of Flexible Haptic Forceps Based on the Electrohydraulic Transmission System

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has many benefits, e.g., unnecessary trauma and blood loss can be minimized by opening tiny surgery scars, recovery process of patients can be lessened, and the possibilities of complications can be decreased. The natural orifice transluminal surgery (NOTES) is one of the MIS surgical methodologies. NOTES surgery is performed using an endoscope. This methodology does not rely on making holes to patients' body to insert the medical instruments. Although some medical robots for NOTES have been proposed, current robots mainly suffer from the absence/limitation of haptic feedback to the surgeon's hands. In order to overcome this problem, this paper proposes electro hydraulic transmission system (EHTS) based forceps. The EHTS is a remote actuation system using fluid energy. By using the EHTS, the classical position and force transmission losses will not be influenced by the tube's shape. The validity of the proposal and its advantages have been experimentally verified and presented in this paper.