The days of waiting for a swallowed item to pass through the body may soon be gone thanks to a tiny, foldable, ingestible, origami robot. A team of researchers from the University of Sheffield, Tokyo Institute of Technology and MIT have created a tiny origami robot that can be steered inside the digestive tract to remove foreign objects or treat internal wounds. Slash Gear reports: Once in the stomach, that capsule dissolves and the robot unfolds itself and can then be steered by an external magnetic field to a specific location inside the stomach where it can treat injuries. “It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care,” says Daniela Rus, who also directs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It’s really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether.” This isn’t the first origami robot that MIT has developed, but this one is different from those previous designs. Previous origami robots used something called stick-slip to move which only works when the robot is stiff [...]
