A surgical instrument is provided, including: at least one articulatable arm having a distal end, a proximal end, and at least one joint region disposed between the distal and proximal ends; an optical fiber bend sensor provided in the at least one joint region of the at least one articulatable arm; a detection system coupled to the optical fiber bend sensor, said detection system comprising a light source and a light detector for detecting light reflected by or transmitted through the optical fiber bend sensor to determine a position of at least one joint region of the at least one articulatable arm based on the detected light reflected by or transmitted through the optical fiber bend sensor; and a control system comprising a servo controller for effectuating movement of the arm.

Robotic surgery system including position sensors using fiber bragg gratings

A surgical instrument is inserted through a guide tube. A telemanipulation system moves the distal end of the surgical instrument in all six Cartesian degrees of freedom independently of any guide tube movements.

Minimally invasive surgical system

In-service structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures plays a key role in the assessment of their performance and integrity. In recent years, Fibre Optic Sensors (FOS) have proved to be a potentially excellent technique for real-time in-situ monitoring of these structures due to their numerous advantages, such as immunity to electromagnetic interference, small size, light weight, durability, and high bandwidth, which allows a great number of sensors to operate in the same system, and the possibility to be integrated within the material. However, more effort is still needed to bring the technology to a fully mature readiness level. In this paper, recent research and applications in structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures using FOS have been critically reviewed, considering both the multi-point and distributed sensing techniques.

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Fibre Optic Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring of Aircraft Composite Structures: Recent Advances and Applications.

Polymer optical fibers (POFs) have significant advantages for many sensing applications, including high elastic strain limits, high fracture toughness, high flexibility in bending, high sensitivity to strain and potential negative thermo-optic coefficients. The recent emergence of single-mode POFs has enabled high precision, large deformation optical fiber sensors. This article describes recent advances in both multi-mode and single-mode POF based strain and temperature sensors. The mechanical and optical properties of POFs relevant to strain and temperature applications are first summarized. POFs considered include multi-mode POFs, solid core single-mode POFs and microstructured single-mode POFs. Practical methods for applying POF sensors, including connecting and embedding sensors in structural materials, are also described. Recent demonstrations of multi-mode POF sensors in structural applications based on new interrogation methods, including backscattering and time-of-flight measurements, are outlined. The phase‐displacement relation of a single-mode POF undergoing large deformation is presented to build a fundamental understanding of the response of single-mode POF sensors. Finally, this article highlights recent single-mode POF based sensors based on polymer fiber Bragg gratings and microstructured POFs. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)

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Polymer optical fiber sensors—a review

A fiber-optic strain sensor is demonstrated by using a short length of polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber (PM-PCF) as the sensing element inserted in a Sagnac loop interferometer. Spectrum shift in response of strain with a sensitivity of 0.23pm∕μe is achieved, and the measurement range, by stretching the PM-PCF only, is up to 32me. Due to the ultralow thermal sensitivity of the PM-PCF, the proposed strain sensor is inherently insensitive to temperature, eliminating the requirement for temperature compensation.

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Temperature-insensitive strain sensor with polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber based Sagnac interferometer

The reflection and transmission characteristics of a high-birefringence fiber loop mirror (HiBi-FLM), which is composed of a standard fiber coupler and one-section or multisection high-birefringence fibers (HBFs), are analyzed and discussed in detail. Theoretical reflectivity and transmissivity expressions for HiBi-FLMs with one-, two-, and three-section HBFs were obtained. The procedure for calculating reflectivity and transmissivity for HiBi-FLMs with n-section HBFs is given. Experimental results have verified the theoretical model. The basic characteristics of the one-section HiBi-FLM when strain and high temperature are applied to HBFs were analyzed and investigated theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis. Furthermore, a strain– temperature sensor that makes use of those characteristics, which is new for applications of HiBi-FLMs, has been proposed and demonstrated.

High-birefringence fiber loop mirrors and their applications as sensors.

A simple, compact, and highly sensitive optical fiber directional bend sensor is presented. This device consists of a lateral-offset splicing joint and an up-taper formed through excessive fusion splicing method. The lateral-offset splicing breaks the cylindrical symmetry of the fiber and defines a pair of directions along which the bending response of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer transmission spectrum is different and thus could be used for bending vector measurement. For a curvature range from -3 to 3 m(-1), the bending sensitivities at 1463.86 nm and 1548.41 nm reach 11.987 nm/m(-1) and 8.697 nm/m(-1), respectively.

Fiber-optic bending vector sensor based on Mach–Zehnder interferometer exploiting lateral-offset and up-taper

An improved FBG-type sensor for simultaneous measurement of force (or displacement) and temperature based on the bilateral cantilever beam (BCB) is proposed and demonstrated. The two parts of the beam are subject to opposite forces (or displacements) leading to a red shift for the part of the FBG subject to stretch and to a blue shift for the other one. An FBG bonded to the surface of the middle of the BCB is experimentally demonstrated to have a force sensitivity of /spl sim/1.046 nm/N, a sensitivity of the displacement-based strain of /spl sim/0.317 nm/mm, and a temperature sensitivity of /spl sim/0.190 nm//spl deg/C between 0/spl deg/C and 70/spl deg/C, respectively.

FBG-type sensor for simultaneous measurement of force (or displacement) and temperature based on bilateral cantilever beam

An embedded fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor for simultaneous measurement of stress and temperature is proposed, where a uniform FBG is capsulated in a tapered polymer so that the grating is linearly chirped when the sensor is stressed The value of applied stress and temperature can be obtained by measuring the chirp and central wavelength via a coefficient matrix Experimental results demonstrate that the sensor has a stress sensitivity of 262/spl times/10/sup -3/nm/N and a temperature sensitivity of 0108 nm//spl deg/C Since the FBG is well protected and no sudden strain change is imposed on it, the sensor is expected to have an excellent reliability

An embedded FBG sensor for simultaneous measurement of stress and temperature

A novel, low-cost, and simple dual-parameter measurement scheme based on a cascaded optical fiber device composed of a long-period fiber grating (LPFG) and an S fiber taper Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SFT-MZI) is proposed and demonstrated. The crosstalk problem is solved as different resonance peaks of the LPFG and the MZI possess different refractive index (RI) and temperature sensitivities. Experimental results show distinctive spectral sensitivities of -52.57 nm/refractive index unit (RIU) and 45.87 pm/°C by the LPFG, and 311.48 nm/RIU (in the RI range of 1.33-1.37) and 12.87 pm/°C by the SFT-MZI. The simultaneous measurement of external RI and the temperature is experimentally demonstrated by the sensor. The RI and temperature calculated by the sensor matrix agree well with the actual RI and temperature in the experiment.

Weigang Zhang

Papers

High-birefringence fiber loop mirrors and their applications as sensors.

Fiber-optic bending vector sensor based on Mach–Zehnder interferometer exploiting lateral-offset and up-taper

FBG-type sensor for simultaneous measurement of force (or displacement) and temperature based on bilateral cantilever beam

An embedded FBG sensor for simultaneous measurement of stress and temperature

Long-Period Fiber Grating Cascaded to an S Fiber Taper for Simultaneous Measurement of Temperature and Refractive Index