July 31st, 2008 by ketyung
Robots can get extremely tiny in size these days. Such as just about the size of a pill is all possible today. Such a super tiny-sized robot will be best used in medical and many other useful applications.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have successfully developed a pill capsule-like tiny bot, which is to be used to effectively examine the internal organs of a patient.
A patient will just swallow the tiny bot like a normal pill. And the pill-like robot will then swim itself through the intestine of the patient, capture images and feedback to the doctor wirelessly.
The pill-like robot is adhesive enough, which it can anchor inside the intestine of a patient, yet it’s gentle enough not to leave any wound on the patient’s gut. The tiny bot allows the doctor to control it wirelessly. It’s equipped legs, and also the mentioned anchor, which are all controllable wirelessly by the doctor.
The tiny bot is not only restricted to use for capturing images of the patient’s gut. It has also great potential of uses for biopsies, drug delivery, heat treatment, and other treatment applications. At the current stage, the researchers still have lots of work to twist this tiny bot to perfect its anchoring inside the patient’s gut.
The challenging part is of course, how to get it to anchor securely inside the patient’s internal organs. The researchers are striving now to find an appropriate adhesive to be used on this tiny bot which allows it to repeatedly stick itself in various internal organs such as intestines, esophagus, stomach, so it can be more freely moving around to suit various needs of applications.
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