A New Magneto-Rheological Skin for Controlling Pressure of Haptic Devices

摘要

In this paper, a new skin tissue which can emulate the stiffness of several organs of human being is proposed andanalyzed utilizing a magneto-rheological (MR) fluid. It is called MR skin. The proposed skin can be applied to the robotassistedsurgery manipulated by the haptic devices as a controllable tactile sensor. In order to formulate the device, thevalve networks are embedded inside the structure of the master actuator. These valves use the flow mode and shear modeof MR fluid for the pressure control. The deformation equation of the MR skin is derived and the external forcecontacting to the MR skin is also analyzed. After formulating, the proposed tactile display is optimized by using thefinite element method. In the optimization process, many different forces are applied to view different deformation ofMR skin with different pressures. It is shown via the optimization that the results satisfy the initial requirements of thedesign. This result directly indicates that the proposed MR skin structure is feasible in the manufacturing sense andapplicable to haptic devices for robotic surgery.