Design of a Magnetic Actuated Fully Insertable Robotic Camera System for Single-Incision Laparoscopic Surgery

This paper presents the design of a novel insertable robotic capsule camera system for single-incision laparoscopic surgery. This design features a unified mechanism for anchoring, navigating, and rotating a fully insertable camera by externally generated rotational magnetic field. The design is inspired by the spherical motor concept where the external stator generates anchoring and rotational magnetic field to control the motion of the insertable robotic capsule camera. The insertable camera body, which has no active locomotion mechanism onboard, is capsulated in a one-piece housing with two ring-shaped tail-end magnets and one cylindrical central magnet embedded onboard as a rotor. The stator positioned outside an abdominal cavity consists of both permanent magnets and electromagnetic coils for generating reliable rotational magnetic field. The initial prototype results in a compact insertable camera robot with a $\text{12.7}\;\text{mm}$ diameter and a $\text{68 mm}$ length. The design concepts are analyzed theoretically and verified experimentally. The experiments validate that the proposed camera robot design provides reliable camera fixation and locomotion capabilities under various testing conditions.