Origami robot may operate from the inside the body
It may sound like science fiction but university researchers have built a tiny, foldable robot that may one day operate on people -- from inside their body.
This tiny robot would be swallowed inside a capsule and then, once inside the patient's stomach, it would unfold itself and then crawl across the stomach to repair a wound or remove a swallowed button battery, for instance.
"It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," said Daniela Rus, an MIT professor who also directs the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in a statement. "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."
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here