Abstract
This paper presents a repulsive force feedback control in a haptic master–slave robot-assisted system for robot minimally invasive surgery. In general, the haptic master can provide position and force information for superior performance and reliability in master–slave robot-assisted interventions for a surgeon. In order to realize this potential, in this work three degrees of freedom electrorheological haptic master is adopted and associated with a four degrees of freedom slave robot. The haptic master featuring controllable electrorheological fluid is featured by a spherical joint mechanism and the slave robot is controlled by servomotors. After designing a user interface that is capable of providing force feedback in all the degrees of freedom available during robot minimally invasive surgery, the dynamic model of the haptic master is analyzed and the model parameters are identified to evaluate control performance of the haptic master on skin- and cancer-like tissues (palpation). Subsequently, the haptic architecture for robot minimally invasive surgery is established and experimentally implemented so that the reflection force for the object of the slave robot and the desired position for the master operator are transferred to each other. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, repulsive force tracking control performances are evaluated and presented in time domain.