Title: An Effectiveness Study Across Baseline and Neural Network-based Force Estimation Methods on the da Vinci Research Kit Si System

Abstract: In this study, we further investigate the robustness and generalization ability of an neural network (NN) based force estimation method, using the da Vinci Research Kit Si (dVRK-Si). To evaluate our method's performance, we compare the force estimation accuracy with several baseline methods. We conduct comparative studies between the dVRK classic and dVRK-Si systems to benchmark the effectiveness of these approaches.
We conclude that the NN-based method provides comparable force estimation accuracy across the two systems, as the average root mean square error (RMSE) over the average range of force ratio is approximately 3.07% for the dVRK classic, and 5.27% for the dVRK-Si. On the dVRK-Si, the force estimation RMSEs for all the baseline methods are 2 to 4 times larger than the NN-based method in all directions. One possible reason is, we made assumptions in the baseline methods that static forces remain the same or dynamics is time-invariant. These assumptions may hold for the dVRK Classic, as it has pre-loaded weight and maintains horizontal self balance. Since the dVRK-Si configuration does not have this property, assumptions do not hold anymore, therefore the NN-based method significantly outperforms.