Placement of accelerometers for high sensing resolution in micromanipulation

High sensing resolution is required in sensing of surgical instrument motion in micromanipulation tasks. Accelerometers can be employed to sense physiological motion of the instrument during micromanipulation. Various configurations of accelerometer placement had been introduced in the past to sense motion of a rigid-body such as a surgical instrument. Placement (location and orientation) of accelerometers fixed in the instrument plays a significant role in achieving high sensing resolution. However, there is no literature or work on the effect of placement of accelerometers on sensing resolution. In this paper, an approach of placement of accelerometers within an available space to obtain highest possible sensing resolution in sensing of rigid-body motion in micromanipulation tasks is proposed. Superiority of the proposed placement approach is shown in sensing of a microsurgical instrument angular motion by comparing sensing resolutions achieved as a result of employing the configuration following the proposed approach and the existing configurations. Apart from achieving high sensing resolution, and design simplicity, the proposed placement approach also provides flexibility in placing accelerometers; hence it is especially useful in applications with limited available space to mount accelerometers.