Propulsion of a Swimming Micro Medical Robot

Abstract

Medical doctors use radiology, endoscopy and smart pills to inspect the human body's inner content. Nowadays, self-propelled micro robots are developed to fulfill these tasks which use types of crawling techniques to advance. This paper suggests a novel swimming method, which creates a traveling wave in an elastic tail made of piezo-electric actuators, for propulsion of a micro-robot in the body. The novel swimming method was analyzed and optimized analytically by solving the coupled elastic/fluidic problem. It was found that under the extreme size limitations a tail manufactured by current MEMS technology is able to swim at the order of several mm/sec in water.