A tiny robot that unfolds to perform surgery inside the body.
A tiny robot that unfolds to perform surgery inside the body.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny robot that can be swallowed and used to collect batteries in the body.
It sounds like a curiously niche task, until you discover that many people accidentally swallow small batteries – most of them children. If the batteries leak inside the body, they can cause burns and even death, and the surgery to retreive these batteries can be difficult.
The origami robot is encased in a capsule that melts in the stomach; once there it unfolds, and is steered with the use of a magnetic field outside the body. In dozens of lab tests on artificial stomachs, the robot was able to successfully retrieve a battery using an embedded magnet, taking an average of five minutes to do so.
The next step is to try the procedure on test animals. If the researchers succeed, this mini robot could one day save human lives.
