Development of a pneumatically driven forceps manipulator IBIS IV

In the teleoperated minimally invasive surgery systems, measurement and display of sense of force to the operator is a problem. We have proposed a pneumatic surgical manipulator that is capable of estimating external force, without the use of force sensors. However, the force estimation had a sensitivity of only 3[N] because of inertia and friction effect. In this paper, we newly developed an improved model of the surgical manipulator IBIS IV to solve this problem. The base part of the forceps becomes compact and succeeded in reduce the weight. We conducted some experiments including in-vivo experiment and confirmed that the effectiveness and improvement of the manipulator.