Tiny, Ingestible Robot Made Of Meat Can Work Wonders Inside You

By R. Siva Kumar - 15 May '16 14:13PM

A strange problem that no one knows much about is the fact that every year, about 3,500 people in the U.S.----most of them small children----swallow button batteries.

Most of the time, the batteries tend to just pass through the bodies without harm. However, if they come in touch with the esophagus or the stomach, the batteries might lead to an electric current producing hydroxide that can burn the body's tissue.

The problem was brought up by a postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shuhei Miyashita. She drew the attention of Daniela Rus, a professor leading the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She showed through a simple experiment that the little batteries could be very dangerous.

"Shuhei bought a piece of ham, and he put the battery on the ham," Rus explained on MIT's website. "Within half an hour, the battery was fully submerged in the ham. So that made me realize that, yes, this is important. If you have a battery in your body, you really want it out as soon as possible."

Hence, Miyashita and Rus headed a team that came up with a creative solution. They developed a tiny, origami robot in a capsule that can be swallowed. Once it is ingested, the robot can open itself and then gets steered by outside magnetic fields. It manages to creep down the stomach walls, grasp and remove the battery that has been swallowed.

The robot can also help to patch up and heal internal wounds, say the researchers. The research team includes scientists from MIT, the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

"This concept is both highly creative and highly practical, and it addresses a clinical need in an elegant way," Bradley Nelson, a robotics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, told MIT. "It is one of the most convincing applications of origami robots that I have seen."

It was important to find materials that would not be rejected by the human body, but would be used. The most favourable material was a kind of dried pig intestine that can be used in sausage casings.

"We spent a lot of time at Asian markets and the Chinatown market looking for materials," team member Shuguang Li said.

The new origami robot has a lot of importance in medical science. "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," she added.

The team presents the robot this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.