Laparoscopic surgery provides minimally invasive access to the abdominal cavity but poses control challenges for robotic systems due to the fulcrum constraint at the abdominal wall and the simultaneous interaction of the instrument with both the abdominal wall and internal soft tissue. While current clinical platforms (e.g., da Vinci) primarily rely on visual feedback and do not possess force sensors at the instrument tip, the transition to autonomous robotic surgery requires precise force feedback to ensure safety and effective tissue manipulation. Therefore, developing methods to decouple interaction forces using a single force sensor configuration is a critical enabling technology for future instrumented surgical robots. This paper presents a force-decoupling method that estimates, using only one force sensor, the individual forces applied to the abdominal wall and to internal soft tissue through a viscoelastic modeling approach based on Maxwell elements. Two configurations were evaluated, showing that a single-element Maxwell model provides the best trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity, achieving estimation errors of 9% and 13% for abdominal wall forces, with a root mean square error (RMSE) below 0.36 N. The method was implemented and experimentally validated in a force-controlled robotic system, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving force regulation and interaction safety without requiring additional sensors.
Galán-Cuenca et al. (2026) studied this question.