Abstract
Robotic applications involving manipulation of soft materials are receiving increasing attention. A particular case of this problem is the manipulation of soft body tissues for robotic applications in medicine. The ability to sense and characterize the mechanical properties of soft tissues is a prerequisite for a robot to carry out any real intervention for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Identifying regions of different mechanical propertics by touch is in fact not only potentially useful per se, but critical for a robot in order to execute, for example, surgical operations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a method for discriminating mechanical inhomogeneities into a soft tissue, in the simplified case of spherical inclusions. The proposed model has been validated through an experimental approach, also described in the paper, based on the use of a finger-like palpation device equipped with a fingertip piezoelectric polymer film tactile sensor.
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© 1990 Springer-Verlag
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Sabatini, A.M., Dario, P., Bergamasco, M. (1990). Interpretation of mechanical properties of soft tissues from tactile measurements. In: Hayward, V., Khatib, O. (eds) Experimental Robotics I. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042534
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0042534
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