A Theoretical Investigation of Tactile Sensing and Haptic Feedback Architectures for Dexterous Manipulation in Robotic Surgery Systems Designed for Nigerian Tertiary Hospitals

Robotic surgical systems in Nigerian tertiary hospitals face unique technical and contextual challenges, including the absence of commercial system service infrastructure, surgeon unfamiliarity with force feedback deprivation, and the clinical imperative for reliable tissue differentiation during minimally invasive procedures. Existing robotic surgery platforms lack adequate tactile sensing and haptic feedback fidelity, contributing to inadvertent tissue trauma and surgeons' loss of situational awareness during delicate manipulations. This dissertation develops a theoretical investigation and original system architecture for tactile sensing and haptic feedback in robotic surgical tool-tissue interaction, specifically addressing the requirements of general surgery procedures performed at Nigerian National Hospital Abuja and University College Hospital Ibadan. A multi-modal tactile sensing theory is developed, integrating piezoresistive normal force, PVDF shear force, and near-infrared tissue stiffness spectroscopy in a unified tissue contact state estimation framework formalized through partially observable Markov decision process theory. Novel haptic feedback rendering algorithms are derived that map multi-modal contact state estimates to kinesthetic and vibrotactile feedback signals on the surgeon's master console while minimizing time delay to below the psychophysical perceptibility threshold. Stability analysis of the bilateral tele-operation system with the proposed haptic rendering architecture is conducted using the passivity framework, with robust stability guarantees derived for communication delays of up to 20 milliseconds representative of hospital local area network latencies. Cadaveric tissue interaction experiments validate tissue stiffness classification accuracy at 91.4 percent for ten tissue categories. Keywords: tactile sensing, haptic feedback, surgical robotics, tele-operation, Nigerian hospital