A locomotive mechanism for a robotic colonoscope

Abstract

The increasing trend towards low fiber, high fat diets is leading to increasing pathology in the colon. Colonoscopy is a dexterous skill for doctors to perform and the procedure is painful to the patient. In this paper, we propose a new and simple locomotive mechanism that can be propelled by elliptic motion of multi legs. It has several legs that have constant phase difference to each other and are disposed along the upper and lower ends of the body. In order to evaluate the performance of the locomotive mechanism, we carried out simulations of moving characteristics and experiments in several environments including the colon of a pig.