Medical ultrasound (US) is of increasing importance in medical diagnosis and intraoperative assistance and possesses great potential advantages when integrated with robotics. However, some concerns, including the operation efficiency, operation safety, image quality, and comfort of patients, remain after introducing robotics into medical ultrasound. In this article, an ultrasound robot integrating a force control mechanism, force/torque measurement mechanism, and online adjustment method is proposed to overcome the current limitations. The ultrasound robot can measure operating forces and torques, provide adjustable constant operating forces, eliminate great operating forces introduced by accidental operations, and achieve various scanning depths based on clinical requirements. The proposed ultrasound robot would potentially facilitate sonographers to find the targets quickly, improve operation safety and efficiency, and decrease patients’ discomfort. Simulations and experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the ultrasound robot. Experimental results show that the proposed ultrasound robot is able to detect operating force in the $z$ -direction and torques around the $x$ - and $y$ -directions with errors of 3.53%, 6.68%, and 6.11% F.S., maintain the constant operating force with errors of less than 0.57 N, and achieve various scanning depths for target searching and imaging. This proposed ultrasound robot has good performance and would potentially be used in medical ultrasound.

Robot-assisted endovascular catheterization is generally performed remotely; interventionists perceive the operation status and control surgical instruments through haptic interfaces. Our main objective is to create a haptic interface that retains interventionists’ prior clinical operating experience, including motion perception, force feedback, torque feedback, tactile sensation, and operating mode. The haptic interface can capture the interventionists’ operation of both catheters and guidewires and generate force and torque to assist the interventionists in performing surgeries on the master side. The tactile sensation and traditional operating mode are retained by adopting real commercial catheters/guidewires as the operating handles and designing a cooperative operation paradigm. A novel sensor-based force generation solution and a torque generation method with a pantograph mechanism were proposed to improve the force and torque feedback accuracy. Laboratory and animal experiments illustrated the good feasibility of the proposed haptic interface. The proposed haptic interface has a good performance and can enable interventionists to utilize their prior accumulated clinical operating experience. This research could provide a reference for the design of haptic interfaces, and the developed haptic interface has the potential for use in robot-assisted endovascular catheterization.

This article presents a multifunctional capsule robot (MCR) with active locomotion, dual-drug load, and selective drug release. The MCR has a high ratio of the volume of loaded drug to the total volume of the capsule (RDC) and can provide sufficient dosages for treatment. The MCR might be used to address the limitations in robot-assisted drug delivery, greatly improving the efficiency of intestinal disease treatment. The MCR is composed of a locomotion unit and a drug delivery unit, and these units are controlled by two orthogonal rotating magnetic fields. This proposed MCR enables active locomotion to target positions and selects to release two different drugs according to clinic requirements. In vitro and ex vivo experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the MCR. Experimental results show that the maximum drug loading capacity of the MCR is 1.5 g, and the maximum advance and retreat velocities are 11.8 mm/s and 10.4 mm/s, respectively, when the MCR is fully loaded. The MCR can release two different drugs in various targets and no noticeable damages to the pig intestine were observed to the naked eyes. The MCR will have potential further application for intestinal disease treatment.

This paper proposes a main-functional module working concept for capsule robots, and the capsule robots consist of a main module and functional modules based on this concept. The main module drives the functional modules and provides guidance and support for the functional modules while the functional modules perform the specific diagnosis or treatment. In addition, we propose a novel single-function design concept, which enables different functional modules to have different functions according to the medical requirements. The diagnosis and treatment functions are separated, and they will allow each module to work more specifically and efficiently. Various functional modules can be selected according to medical requirements, and thus it can improve treatment efficiency and reduce medical costs. The single-function design concept eliminates the need to integrate multiple functions into one robot and decrease manufacturing difficulty. Besides, we present a novel docking-separation method to realize effective docking and rapid separation for capsule robots. It can also enable the docked robot to work in bent parts of intestinal tracts easily. A multimodule capsule robot (MCR) was fabricated and the performance was evaluated through experiments. Experimental results demonstrated that the robot modules could be controlled independently and could dock reliably and separate easily. Moreover, the MCR can prevent accidental separation and has potential applications in the clinical practices of intestinal tracts.

Capsule robots have the potential for intestinal treatment due to their unique advantages compared with traditional diagnosis and treatment. However, current capsule robots can only carry and release one type of drug, while more drugs would be needed during the treatment. In addition, the volume of loaded drugs will be restricted due to the small dimensions of the capsule robot, and released drugs need to be guaranteed to have a sufficient dosage for treatment. In this paper, to overcome these limitations, a system was proposed, and the robot consists of a leader robot module and several robot modules. Each robot module can load two types of drugs, and any two robot modules can achieve docking and separations according to the clinical requirements. Laboratory experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show that the robot modules can move with speeds of 28.5 mm/s, 25.1 mm/s, 22.3 mm/s, and 14.5 mm/s when they load drugs of 0 g, 0.6 g, 1.2 g, and 1.8 g, respectively. Ex vivo experiments demonstrated that two robot modules could dock and separate from each other and release drugs at target positions and did not cause damage to the lining of the intestine. This proposed multi-drug modular capsule robot could prove a reference for drug release and control and have the potential for further applications.

Magnetically controlled capsule robots offer unique advantages for performing intestinal biopsies. In this paper, we propose a novel Magnetically Controlled Capsule Robot for Intestinal Biopsy (MCCR-IB), capable of both navigation and biopsy within the intestine. To address the coupling issue between locomotion control and biopsy control, a magnetic field locking method is also introduced. The locomotion performance, curved-passage capability, and biopsy ability were experimentally evaluated. Under a 7 Hz rotating magnetic field, the MCCR-IB achieved forward and backward velocities of 20.22 mm/s and 18.27 mm/s, respectively, with a biopsy needle puncture force of 1.99 N. Furthermore, ex vivo experiments were conducted to preliminarily verify the feasibility of the robot’s motion and biopsy functions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MCCR-IB exhibits good performance and shows promising potential for future clinical applications.