Performance Evaluation of Force Feedback for the Improved Vascular Interventional Robotic System

Currently, the study of the vascular interventional surgery (VIS) robot becomes more and more popular, which is to improve the safety of the surgery. In this paper, a novel master-slave robotic catheter system has been proposed for the VIS. The system uses MR (magneto rheological) fluid to implement force feedback. The force feedback to the operator on the master side is very important to improve the safety of the surgery. The damper is a piston structure with MR fluid. The coil winds around the piston. When the piston is moving in the piston cylinder, the resistance to the piston will appear as a certain amount of current applied to the coil. We can realize the force feedback by this way. The surgeon can feel the force through the operating catheter connected with the damper, which seems that the surgeon operates the catheter beside the patient. The force feedback evaluation experiments of the damper were done. The error between the detected force and the damping force is in the allowable range. The maximum of error is lower than 0.1N. According to a research presenting that the force larger than 0.12N will injure the vessel, it indicates that the error can meet our design requirement. The experimental results indicated that the damper was effective for realizing the force feedback of the master-slave system. It can provide force feedback to the surgeon in real time.