Clamp-Based Electronic Skin With Micro Piezoresistive Array and Finger-Mounted Tactile Feedback for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery

Loss of tactile feedback is an important issue that weakens the effectiveness of robotic surgery in the field of instrumentation and measurement, hindering surgeons from performing precise operations on the target tissue. To integrate tactile feedback in surgical robots, this study develops a low-cost electronic skin with micro piezoresistive array based on multi-walled carbon nanotubes and polydimethylsiloxane with excellent chemical stability and biocompatibility, and a finger-mounted tactile feedback system based on polar polyvinylidene fluoride and poly (3, 4-ethylenedioxythiophene). The electronic skin is embedded in the cavity of the medical non-invasive clamp to monitor its clamping force, slipping, and torsion. The finger-mounted tactile feedback system simulates the tactile sensations detected by a surgical robot’s end effector through physical feedback to the user’s finger. According to the calibration results, the electronic skin can measure clamping force up to 5 N, with the sensitivity of 4.08 N–1, the accuracy of 5.82%, and the repeatability error of less than 3.42%. In the performance testing, the finger-mounted tactile feedback system enables direct feedback of the robot’s tactile information, showing an overall recognition accuracy of over 85%. This study has a good practical value and provides a new idea for the realization of tactile perception and feedback of surgical robots.