Abstract
Palpation of human tissue during Minimally Invasive Surgery is hampered due to restricted access. In this extended abstract, we present a variable stiffness and dynamic force range sensor that has the potential to address this challenge. The sensor utilises light reflection to estimate sensor deformation, and from this, the force applied. Experimental testing at different pressures (0, 0.5 and 1 PSI) shows that stiffness and force range increases with pressure. The force calibration results when compared with measured forces produced an average RMSE of 0.016, 0.0715 and 0.1284 N respectively, for these pressures.
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant # N\(^{\circ }\)101092518] and funded by the European Union.
The design files, dataset, program and the instructions are uploaded to a Github repository Variable Stiffness Sensor.
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Dawood, A.B., Zhang, Z., Angelmahr, M., Arezzo, A., Althoefer, K. (2025). Variable Stiffness & Dynamic Force Sensor for Tissue Palpation. In: Huda, M.N., Wang, M., Kalganova, T. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15051. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72059-8_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72059-8_25
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