Development of a peristaltic crawling robot attached to a large intestine endoscope using bellows - type artificial rubber muscles

This paper describes the development of an endoscopic robot attached to a large intestine endoscope. Colorectal cancer can be cured completely if they are discovered and treated early with a large intestine endoscope. Conventional endoscope can screen and heal inside of the intestine. But, operation of the endoscope is hard for doctors; the training is needed many times. In addition, even if experienced doctors, it occasionally spends one hour for this operation. In this study, in order to solve these problems, we propose the endoscopic robot using peristaltic crawling with bellows-type artificial rubber muscle. This robot can move forward automatically and pulling up the slack. In addition, because of bellows-type artificial rubber muscle, this robot can also pass bent pipes like splenic flexure. Unlike another endoscopic robot, our robot can be attached the endoscope. Thus we can use various function of the conventional endoscope. In this paper, in order to pass splenic flexure, we describe that we fabricated bellows-type artificial muscle. Next, we experimentally confirmed that the robot can pull up the sigmoid colon of the large intestine of dead swine that is arranged in the human body. In addition, in a large intestine model, we reach a endoscope to the cecum with the robot.