Structural Design And Motion Control Of A Magnetically Actuated Capsule Robot With Biopsy Function

At present,the incidence of gastrointestinal diseases is high in China,and the demand for gastroenteroscopy is also increasing year by year.Because traditional endoscopy will bring greater pain to patients,capsule endoscopy technology has gradually been widely used in clinical practice.The capsule endoscopy is a medical device used for painless inspection of the digestive tract.It can be used to collect images of the entire human digestive tract,and then pysicians can evaluate the patient’s gastrointestinal health based on the collected image information.However,according to the feedback in clinical use,the current commercial capsule endoscopes have the problem of simple functions,many medical functions urgently needed by pysicians cannot be satisfied.Therefore,integrating diversified medical functions on the capsule endoscope has become the research focus of relevant institutions.On the basis of the current capsule endoscope technology,we propose a novel capsule robot for human stomach.Compared with the traditional capsule endoscope,this robot can take into account two additional medical functions: 1)active locomotion function 2)biopsy sampling function.The addition of active locomotion function enables the robot to inspect key suspicious areas in the digestive tract and speed up the entire inspection.The addition of biopsy sampling function enables pysicians to take samples of tissues in suspicious areas for further tests so as to make a more accurate judgment of the disease.In addition,the most prominent feature of the robot is that it uses a magnetic field as the actuate source for the newly added functional modules.All the energy is provided by the external magnetic field,which helps to control the volume and improve the battery life.In order to provide the external actuating magnetic field required for the experiment,this paper specially developed a set of magnetic actuating system based on rectangular coil and established the magnetic actuating algorithm accordingly.The system can be used to actuate a capsule robot prototype(15mm×32 mm)for various verification experiments.The experiment is mainly divided into two parts: active locomotion experiment and biopsy sampling experiment.Among them,the results of the active locomotion experiment show that the designed capsule robot has linear,curved,floating and translational motion capabilities.The results of biopsy sampling experiments show that the proposed capsule robot can complete biopsy sampling tasks in various situations such as upward,downward and lateral.