We aimed to develop an active catheter that could be used safely in human blood vessels. The various types of active catheter were proposed to realize bending degrees of freedom and to select courses at a branch point of a blood vessel easily. Since conventional ones were developed with electric actuator like shape memory alloy or conductive polymer and so on, they might damage the patient by its accidental electric leakage. Now, we proposed a new type micro valve and incorporated it into a water pressure-driven system with multi-degree of freedom, to produce an active catheter that was compact and required no electrical power for operation. We actually achieved to develop this valve by applying hybrid micro stereolithography and produced the active catheter with two bending segments successfully. In addition, we experimentally verified the good operational performance of a prototype.
