Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has received increasing attention, both in the academic field and clinical operation. Master/slave control is the most widely adopted manipulation mode for surgical robots. Thus, sensing the force of the surgical instruments located at the end of the slave manipulator through the main manipulator is critical to the operation. This study mainly addressed the force detection of the surgical instrument and force feedback control of the serial surgical robotic arm. A measurement device was developed to record the tool end force from the slave manipulator. An elastic element with an orthogonal beam structure was designed to sense the strain induced by force interactions. The relationship between the acting force and the output voltage was obtained through experiment, and the three-dimensional force output was decomposed using an extreme learning machine algorithm while considering the nonlinearity. The control of the force from the slave manipulator end was achieved. An impedance control strategy was adopted to restrict the force interaction amplitude. Modeling, simulation, and experimental verification were completed on the serial robotic manipulator platform along with virtual control in the MATLAB/Simulink software environment. The experimental results show that the measured force from the slave manipulator can provide feedback for impedance control with a delay of 0.15 s.
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