Design of a miniaturized active endoscopic capsule with revolving head mechanism

An active endoscopic capsule with a simplified construction and revolving head mechanism is designed in this paper. Spiral outer structure is basically employed to help produce propulsive force without contacting the intestine wall. An electromagnetic driven head-swinging module is designed to expand the view angle. The finite element method is used to analyze and optimize the electromagnetic driven head-swinging module on the capsule. In order to validate design of the proposed active endoscopic capsule, a prototype is built and a series of experiments were carried out including moving straight and revolving the head mechanism. Based on the experiment results, it is concluded that the proposed design is effective to achieve the desired performance.