A Hydraulic Haptic Actuator for Simulation of Cardiac Catheters

This article presents a haptic actuator made of silicone rubber to provide both passive and active haptic forces for catheter simulations. The haptic actuator has a torus outer shape with an ellipse-shaped inside chamber which is actuated by hydraulic pressure. Expansion of the chamber by providing positive pressure can squeeze the inside passage to resist the catheter traveling through. Further expansion can hold and push back the catheter in the axial direction to render active haptic forces. The size of the catheter passage is increased by providing negative pressure to the chamber, allowing various diameters of the actual medical catheters to be used and exchanged during the simulation. The diameter of the catheter passage can be enlarged up to 1.6 times to allow 5 to 7 Fr (1 Fr = 1/3 mm) medical catheters to pass through. Experiment results show that the proposed haptic actuator can render 0 to 2.0 N passive feedback force, and a maximum of 2.0 N active feedback force, sufficient for the cardiac catheter simulation. The haptic actuator can render the commanded force profile with 0.10 N RMS (root-mean-squares) and 10.51% L2-norm relative errors.