Experimental evaluation of a haptic interface for endoscopic simulation

The main goal of virtual reality based surgery simulators with haptic feedback is to provide an alternative to traditional training methods on animals, cadavers or real patients. Haptic feedback is a key feature for every surgery simulator for the training of hand-eye coordination. To address the need for higher fidelity and complexity in an endoscopic simulator, we have designed a new haptic interface, instrumented a clinical endoscope and integrated it with a software simulation for colonoscopy. The proposed haptic interface provides high translational force and rotational torque with combined electrical motors and passive brakes. This paper presents the evaluation of the haptic interface. Experimental analyzes are performed for characterization and performance evaluation. A model-based feed-forward control is implemented and the results show that the control successfully compensates for the device dynamics and nonlinearities such as Coulomb and viscous friction.