Development of a Surgical Knife Device for a Multi-fingered Haptic Interface Robot

摘要

This paper presents the design of a surgical knife device for a multi-fingered haptic interface robot called HIRO, and summarizes the experimental results. HIRO consists of a robot arm and a five-fingered hand, and is able to handle the tool with fingers. A variety of tools can be attached to HIRO, and the system is therefore able to present the force sensation of many tool-type devices. For example, in medical training, there are many different shape and usage tools, so a haptic interface that can present the force sensation for many tools will be important for virtual training systems. This paper particularly focuses on the connection between HIRO and a tool-type device. By introducing a performance index, a tool-type device (a surgical knife device) for HIRO that satisfies a certain kind of optimal connection has been developed. Further, several experiments were carried out to investigate the performance of the developed surgical knife device. These results correspond to a display of high-precision force.