Dynamic responses of a vibro-impact capsule robot self-propelling in the large intestine via multibody dynamics

In recent years, colonic capsule endoscopy has become available in clinical practice as an alternative modality to colonoscopy. However, it faces challenges such as prolonged examination time and the absence of clinician navigation. Leveraging their pioneering work in the field of vibro-impact self-propulsion technique for gastrointestinal endoscopy, Zhang et al. (IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 8:1842-1849, 2023) developed a novel, untethered, self-propelled, endoscopic capsule robot, with the aim of providing a new means of examining bowel cancer in real time. To evaluate and optimize the passage of this capsule robot self-propelling in the large intestine, this work adopts multibody dynamics analysis and experimental investigation to study the robot's dynamics and its interaction with the intestinal environment. Considering the complex anatomy of the large intestine, containing different sections, e.g., cecum, ascending, transverse, descending, and sigmoid colon, and variations of the haustra, e.g., with various radii, lengths, and heights, the robot was driven by the square-wave excitation of an inner mass interacting with the capsule body and tested on a real porcine colon. The robot's driving parameters, including the excitation frequency, amplitude, and duty cycle, and the dimensions of the haustra are the two main factors influencing the robot's progression in the intestine. By comparing with the experimental results, the proposed multibody dynamics model developed using MSC Adams can estimate the movement of the capsule robot and the intestinal resistance quantitatively. Extensive numerical and experimental studies suggest an excitation frequency of 60 Hz and a duty cycle of 0.4 as the optimal parameters for driving the robot, and the longer the haustral length is, the faster the robot passes through. These results ensure the validity of the proposed multibody dynamics platform, which can be used by robotic engineers for developing medical robots for intestinal examinations.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11044-025-10052-6.