Design of a Testbed for Haptic Devices Used by Surgical Simulators

Abstract: Nowadays surgery simulations are aiming to apply not just visual effects but forcefeedback as well. To carry out force feedback, haptic devices are utilized that are mostlycommercial products for general purposes. Some of the haptic device features are moreimportant than others in case of surgery simulator use. The precision of the output forcemagnitude is one such property. The specifications provided by haptic devicemanufacturers are lacking details on device characteristics, known to cause difficulties inplanning of accurate surgery simulations.This project shows the design of a testbed that is capable of measuring the precision ofoutput forces within the haptic devices’ workspace. With the testbed, a set ofmeasurements can be run on different haptic devices, giving as a result a betterknowledge of the utilized device. This knowledge aids the design of more precise andrealistic surgery simulations.