Abstract
The number of large intestine cancer patients has been continually increasing. An endoscope is used in diagnosis and also in treatment of a diseased part of an intestine. A large intestine endoscope is used mainly for the inspection of large intestine cancers. However, many doctors are having difficulty in handling an endoscope and remove slack of an intestine. Thus it is anticipated that robotic applications would assist those operations. We propose a robot that mimics the peristaltic crawling of earthworms uses artificial rubber muscle as an actuator. In this paper, we first carry out forward and pulling movement experiments in an acrylic pipe, then forward and pulling movement experiments in a large intestine model. We finally evaluate flexibility of the robot. Satisfactory performances were obtained from the experiments.
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