Robotic Tank Is Designed to Crawl Through Your Intestine
Let's talk about bowels! Most of us have them, most of us use them a lot, and like anything that gets used a lot, they eventually need to get checked out to help make sure that everything will keep working the way it should for as long as you need it to. Generally, this means a colonoscopy, and while there are other ways of investigating what's going on in your guts, a camera on a flexible tube is still the gold-standard method of diagnosis and intervention," according to some robotics researchers who want to change that up a bit.
The University of Colorado's Advanced Medical Technologies Lab has been working on a tank robot called Endoculus that's able to actively drive itself through your intestines, rather than being shoved. The good news is that it's very small, and the bad news is that it's probably not as small as you'd like it to be.
The reason why a robot like Endoculus is necessary (or at least a good idea) is that trying to stuff a semi-rigid endoscopy tube into the semi-floppy tube that is your intestine doesn't always go smoothly. Sometimes, the tip of the endoscopy tube can get stuck, and as more tube is fed in, it causes the intestine to distend, which best case is painful and worst case can cause serious internal injuries. One way of solving this is with swallowable camera pills, but those don't help you with tasks like taking tissue samples. A self-propelled system like Endoculus could reduce risk while also making the procedure faster and cheaper.
Image: Advanced Medical Technologies Lab/University of Colorado The researchers say that while the width of Endoculus is larger than a traditional endoscope, the device would require minimal distention during use" and would not cause pain or harm to the patient." Future versions of the robot, they add, will yield a smaller footprint." Endoculus gets around with four sets of treads, angled to provide better traction against the curved walls of your gut. The treads are micropillared, or covered with small nubs, which helps it deal with all your slippery colon mucosa." Designing the robot was particularly tricky because of the severe constraints on the overall size of the device, which is just 3 cm wide and 2.3 cm high. In order to cram the two motors required for full control, they had to be arranged parallel to the treads, resulting in a fairly complex system of 3D printed worm gears. And to make the robot actually useful, it includes a camera, LED lights, tubes for injecting air and water, and a tool port that can accommodate endoscopy instruments like forceps and snares to retrieve tissue samples.
So far, Endoculus has spent some time inside of a live pig, although it wasn't able to get that far since pig intestines are smaller than human intestines, and because apparently the pig intestine is spiraled somehow. The pig (and the robot) both came out fine. A (presumably different) pig then provided some intestine that was expanded to human-intestine size, inside of which Endoculus did much better, and was able to zip along at up to 40 mm/s without causing any damage. Personally, I'm not sure I'd want a robot to explore my intestine at a speed much higher than that.
The next step with Endoculus is to add some autonomy, which means figuring out how to do localization and mapping using the robot's onboard camera and IMU. And then of course someone has to be the first human to experience Endoculus directly, which I'd totally volunteer for except the research team is in Colorado and I'm not. Sorry!
Novel Optimization-Based Design and Surgical Evaluation of a Treaded Robotic Capsule Colonoscope," by Gregory A. Formosa, J. Micah Prendergast, Steven A. Edmundowicz, and Mark E. Rentschler, from the University of Colorado, was presented at ICRA 2020.
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