A New Tactile Transfer Cell Using Magnetorheological Materials for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

This paper proposes a new type of tactile transfer cell which can be effectively applied to robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS). The proposed tactile device is manufactured from two smart materials, a magnetorheological fluid (MRF) and a magnetorheological elastomer (MRE), whose viscoelastic properties are controllable by an external magnetic field. Thus, it can produce field-dependent repulsive forces which are equivalent to several human organs (or tissues) such as a heart. As a first step, an appropriate tactile sample is made using both MRF and MRE associated with porous foam. Then, the microstructures of these materials taken from Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images are presented, showing the particle distribution with and without the magnetic field. Subsequently, the field-dependent repulsive force of the sample, which is equivalent to the stress relaxation property of viscoelastic materials, are measured at several compressive deformation depths. Then, the measured values are compared with the calculated values obtained from Young’s modulus of human tissue data via the finite element method. It is identified from this comparison that the proposed tactile transfer cell can mimic the repulsive force (or hardness) of several human organs. This directly indicates that the proposed MR materials-based tactile transfer cell (MRTTC in short) can be effectively applied to RMIS in which the surgeon can feel the strength or softness of the human organ by just changing the magnetic field intensity. In this work, to reflect a more practical feasibility, a psychophysical test is also carried out using 20 volunteers, and the results are analyzed, presenting the standard deviation.