Fiber Bragg Grating Force Sensors for Minimally Invasive Surgery: State of the Art, Challenges, and Opportunities

ABSTRACT Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and robot‐assisted MIS reduce access trauma but attenuate direct haptic cues at the tool–tissue interface. Consequently, interaction forces are often inferred indirectly from vision, which can increase uncertainty during force‐sensitive tasks such as grasping, suturing, palpation, and cannulation. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors are attractive for MIS instruments because they are compact, multiplexable, and intrinsically immune to electromagnetic interference, enabling distal force measurement in confined operative spaces. This review surveys FBG‐based force sensors reported for MIS and robot‐assisted MIS, covering sensing principles, mechanical transducer architectures, and interrogation strategies. We summarize representative implementations across ophthalmic microsurgery, natural‐orifice procedures, vascular intervention, and laparoscopy and compare key performance metrics reported in the literature. We further review force/temperature decoupling approaches from calibration‐matrix methods to learning‐based models and discuss practical constraints affecting translation, including packaging and sterilization, strain‐transfer drift, temperature compensation, dynamic bandwidth, and integration with surgical workflows. Finally, we outline research directions to improve robustness and validation toward clinically deployable optical force‐feedback systems.