Method for Extracting Intentional Motion Using Force Sensor in Hand-held Robotic Forceps and Its Effect on Performance

To enhance the performance of multi-degree-of-freedom hand-held forceps that support minimally invasive surgery, it is important to correctly sense the operator's intended operation input. In our hand-held robotic forceps that use a force sensor as an input device, it was necessary to solve the problem of unintended operation input due to gripper operation to move the joint of the forceps. We describe a method for eliminating this unintended input to the interface of the hand-held robotic forceps and present the results of an evaluation of its performance. We used a virtual grasp-and-reach task with cursor manipulation of the forceps' input device in our experiments and evaluated the throughput on the basis of Fitts' law, which is used to evaluate human interfaces; the evaluation was based on the results of manipulations by two participants. The results showed that the mean throughput was 1.5 to 2 times higher when the proposed processing was used. This suggests that the proposed processing of the operational input of the interface contributes to the improvement of performance with the hand-held robotic forceps.