Video: Swallow this robot, it will come ‘alive’ in stomach to act as surgeon

Unveiled at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Stockholm.

By Dileep Thekkethil

Remember the scorpion-like robot that pierces itself into the stomach of Keanu Reeves in the sci-fi film ‘The Matrix’? It seems like researchers have found a relatively non-violent version of the robot that you can eat.

A research team, consisting of scholars from CSAIL, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, announced that they have made an origami robot that can be swallowed. It will come ‘alive’ in the stomach to patch wounds, deliver medicines or remove alien objects. The robot was unveiled during the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Stockholm.

According to the researchers, the robot is frozen into an ice capsule that will melt once it reaches the stomach, releasing the robot. The movement of the robot inside the stomach can be steered using external magnetic fields. It can crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potentially important applications to health care,” said Daniela Rus, Director at MIT CSAIL. She also added “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.”

According to the researchers, they tested about a dozen different possibilities for the structural material before settling on the type of dried pig intestine used in sausage casings.

This is not the first time that such an origami robot with similar functionality is being tested but the researchers claim that the design is significantly different from its predecessors.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potentially important applications to healthcare,” Daniela Rus says.