Design and Modeling of Soft Gears

Abstract

Colonoscopy is the most useful method for detecting the colorectal cancer, however, it takes time to learn how to insert into colon deeply without pain for patients. Therefore, many researchers proposed self-propelled colonoscopy robots. In previous study, we developed a self-propelled colonoscopy robot with a worm gear mechanism. However, hard gears can damage the colon wall. Therefore, we focused on a compliant mechanism, and developed soft gears with elastic deformation. Soft Gears have a variety of potential applications, including a torque limiter. In this study, we propose a design parameter optimization method using a gear design software and a nonlinear modeling method using a finite element analysis (FEA) software, and report on their evaluation results.