Development of Master-Slave Manipulator Using Pneumatic Cylinders

Abstract

Recently, development of instruments for minimally invasive surgery has been considerably required. This surgical procedure, as compared with traditional open surgery, enables the incision smaller, and this result in less patient pain and shorter duration of hospital stays. However, it requires increased skill on the part of the surgeon. To solve this problem, robotic manipulators using electric actuators that have multi-DOFs at thetip of them have been reported as alternative to conventional instruments. These systems, however, has the problem that force sensing is difficult. In this paper, we propose a master-slave manipulator using pneumatic cylinders as actuators that can be useful for laparoscopic surgery. This system can provide force feedback to the surgeon from the differential pressure of the cylinders. We designed a bilateral dynamic control system using neural network for acquisition of the inverse dynamics. The obtained inverse dynamics is used for feedforward and estimation of the external force. Experimental results showed that the developed system successfully display the contact force.