Colorectal cancer is a serious threat to human health. Colonoscopy is the most effective procedure for the inspection of colorectal cancer. However, traditional colonoscopy may cause pain, which can lead to the patient’s fear of colonoscopy. The use of active-motion colonoscopy robots is expected to replace traditional colonoscopy procedures for colorectal cancer screening, without causing pain to patients. This paper proposes an inchworm-like soft colonoscopy robot based on a rubber spring. The motion mechanism of the robot consists of two anchoring units and an elongation unit. The elongation unit of the robot is driven by 3 cables during contraction and by its inherent elasticity during extension. The balloon is selected as the anchoring mechanism of the robot. It has soft contact with the colon and will not damage the colon wall, which means no discomfort is caused. The elastic force test of the rubber spring shows that the elongation unit of the robot has sufficient restorative force to drive the robot to move forward and backward. The influence of the balloon’s expansion size on the dexterity of the robot head is analyzed, and the functions of the balloons are expounded. The balloon can not only assist the robot in its locomotion but also assist the robot to perform a better inspection. The robot can move successfully in a horizontal, straight, and inclined isolated pig colon, showing great clinical application potential.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the deadliest diseases worldwide. Master-slave robotic systems have been widely used in vascular interventional surgery with the benefit of high safety, efficient operation, and procedural facilitation. This paper introduces a remote-controlled vascular interventional robot (RVIR) that aims to enable surgeons to perform complex vascular interventions reliably and accurately under a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) environment. The slave robot includes a guidewire manipulator (GM) and catheter manipulator (CM) that are mainly composed of a hollow driving mechanism and a linear motion platform. The hollow driving mechanism is based on a traveling wave-type hollow ultrasonic motor (HUM) which has high positional precision, fast response, and magnetic interference resistance and realizes the cooperation of the guidewire and catheter by omitting the redundant transmission mechanism and maintaining good coaxiality. The HUM stator, the core part of the RVIR, is optimized by an adaptive genetic algorithm for better quality and greater amplitude of traveling waves, which are beneficial to the drive efficiency and precision. The robot system features great cooperating performance, small hysteresis, and high kinematic accuracy and has been experimentally verified for its capability to precisely manipulate the guidewire and catheter.

Tendon–sheath structures are commonly utilized to drive surgical robots due to their compact size, flexibility, and straightforward controllability. However, long-distance cable tension estimation poses a significant challenge due to its frictional characteristics affected by complicated factors. This paper proposes a miniature tension sensor array for an endoscopic cable-driven parallel robot, aiming to integrate sensors into the distal end of long and flexible surgical instruments to sense cable tension and alleviate friction between the tendon and sheath. The sensor array, mounted at the distal end of the robot, boasts the advantages of a small size (16 mm outer diameter) and reduced frictional impact. A force compensation strategy was presented and verified on a platform with a single cable and subsequently implemented on the robot. The robot demonstrated good performance in a series of palpation tests, exhibiting a 0.173 N average error in force estimation and a 0.213 N root-mean-square error. In blind tests, all ten participants were able to differentiate between silicone pads with varying hardness through force feedback provided by a haptic device.

Polylactide-based piezoelectric nanogenerators were designed and fabricated with improved piezoelectric performances by blending polylactide with hydroxyapatite. The addition of hydroxyapatite significantly improves the crystallinity of polylactide and helps to form hydrogen bonds, which further improved the piezoelectric output performance of these piezoelectric nanogenerators with over three times the open circuit voltage compared with that of pure-polylactide-based devices. Such excellent piezoelectricity of hydroxyapatite/polylactide-based nanogenerators give them great potential for energy harvesting fields.

Images taken by an endoscope in single-port-access surgery are the most important information for directing surgeons to operate, so acquiring images taken at better position and a more desired perspective has profound significance for improving the efficiency and safety of surgery. The magnetically anchored laparoscope can help to realize this goal compared with the traditional laparoscope used in single-port-access surgery. In this paper, we propose the concept of applying ultrasonic motors in the magnetically anchored laparoscope. Two types of ultrasonic motors used for driving the laparoscope, namely a miniature traveling wave-rotating ultrasonic motor and a miniature traveling wave-tilt ultrasonic motor, are designed. The prototype of the magnetically anchored laparoscope using these two types of ultrasonic motors is fabricated and evaluated by experiments. The results show that the maximum output torque of the miniature traveling wave-rotating ultrasonic motor is 1.2 mN·m, and that of the miniature traveling wave-tilt ultrasonic motor is 1.4 mN·m, which is enough to actuate the magnetically anchored laparoscope. Additionally, it is proven that the two designed ultrasonic motors can be applied successfully in the laparoscope.