Haptic feedback is one of the missing links in robotized minimally invasive telesurgery. The teleoperation controllers are optimized so as to offer the surgeon a reliable perception of the stiffness of soft tissue, rather than following the traditional approach where tracking and force reflection fidelity are considered. The experimental results show that optimization allows for better focus on the quality of the haptic information in the performance-stability trade-off. A force sensor to measure the interaction forces with the environment is found to be indispensable for high-quality touch feedback. Next to optimization for realistic feedback of the environment stiffness, in this paper we describe how to extend human perception beyond differential thresholds and thus enhance sensitivity. Experiments on a one-dimensional system demonstrate that the operator is able to discriminate tinier differences using a telemanipulation system with enhanced sensitivity than through direct manipulation.

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This paper describes an advanced fool guiding system for robot assisfed surgery. It is offering two additional local degrees offreedom fo a standard robotic toolguiding system like of the Zeus robotic surgery system. The fool guide is basically a tube thaf guides the inserted surgical instrument Io the desired location. By adding two bending degrees offreedom at the tip, the developedsystem largely increases the manoeuvrability of the instrument. I f consists of a micromachined superelasfic tube driven by a conventional cable system. Main issue was the desip of a flexible hinge system in superelasfic NiTi that offers fhe desired bending angles (at least 90 degrees in both directions) and fhat is compafible with the material limits for long-time cycling. Based on extended FE colculafions and experimental measuremenfs the second-generafion design offers 90 degrees bending in both directions. The improvement over previous devices is the combination of two degrees of freedom with a small diameter of only 5 mm. An additional advantage is the tool channel, which enables the use of different inshxments with this single device.

We present a method for data storage in continuous ferroelectric (FE) media, applicable to storage systems based on one or more scanning probes. Written FE domains are read back in a destructive fashion by applying a constant voltage of magnitude greater than the coercive voltage, as is done in FE random access memory (FeRAM). The resulting flow of screening charges through the readback amplifier provides sufficient signal to allow readback of domains of minimum dimension of the order of 10 nm at MHz rates, orders of magnitude faster than previously demonstrated techniques for readback of domains in continuous FE media.

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