Improving the Force Display of Haptic Device Based on Gravity Compensation for Surgical Robotics

Haptic devices are applied as masters to provide force displays for telemedicinal robots. Gravity compensation has been proven to be crucial for the accuracy and capability of force displays, which are critical for haptic devices to assist operators. Therefore, the existing method suffers from an unsatisfactory effect, a complex implementation, and low efficiency. In this paper, an approach combining active and passive gravity compensation is proposed to improve the performance of a force display. The passive compensation is conducted by counterweights fixed with the moving platform and pantographs to offset most of the gravity and reduce the loads of the motors, while the peak capability of the force display is enhanced. The required weight is optimized by a multi-objective genetic algorithm in terms of the maximum torque of the motors in the global workspace. As a supplement, the residual gravity is eliminated by active compensation to extend the accuracy of the force display. The balancing forces in the discretized workspace are entirely calibrated, and the required force for the arbitrary configuration is calculated by interpolations. The decisions regarding the algorithm parameters are also discussed to achieve a compromise between the effect and elapsed time. Finally, the prototype with a compensation mechanism is implemented and experiments are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the peak capability of the force display is enhanced by 45.43% and the maximum deviation is lowered to 0.6 N