Experimental Structural Stiffness Analysis of a Surgical Haptic Master Device Manipulator

This paper deals with haptic devices for master–slave telesurgical applications. Namely, a stiffness model fitting methodology and its fine-tuning are proposed based on experimental results. In particular, the proposed procedure is based on virtual joint structural stiffness modeling to be applied in time-efficient compliance compensation strategies. A specific case study is discussed by referring to the HISS haptic device that has been developed and built at Izmir Institute of Technology. Two different experimental setups are designed for stiffness evaluation tests. Experimental results are discussed to demonstrate their implementation in the proposed methodology for the fine-tuning of stiffness model.