Design of a Portable Dynamic Calibration Instrument for daVinci Si Tools

Abstract

Tissue crush injuries are more prevalent with laparoscopic surgery than open [1]. Injuries may become more frequent in robotic surgery, because force is often only evaluated by the visual deformation of the tissue [2]. A proposed solution by Sie et al. to mitigate these surgical errors is to create tissue-aware graspers which can be incorporated into existing surgical robots, such as the da Vinci [3]. Stephens et al. created a tissue-aware grasper using backend sensing on a da Vinci Si tool [4]. However, tissue identification can be further improved through properly understanding a dynamic da Vinci tool model. Therefore, instrumentation that can accurately and fully characterize existing robotic tools is needed. Various tool calibration set-ups have been created such as [5], which are not portable and often neglect dynamic ranges. The goal of this paper is to present a portable device that shows promise in capturing the dynamic range for da Vinci Si tools.