Pangolin-inspired robot can roll around your guts administering treatments
Scientists have developed a robot that can perform safe and minimally invasive medical procedures inside the body using a magnetically controlled folding and flexing structure.
Inspired by the pangolin, a small scaly anteater native to Africa, India and southeast Asia, the millirobots are 1cm wide, 2cm long and only 0.2mm thick. The keratin-coated creatures are famously able to roll into a ball despite the rigidity of their scales. Similarly, the robots built by the team led by Metin Sitti, director of the Physical Intelligence Department at Germany's Max Planck Institute, are designed to allow their tiny robots to flex, also aiding locomotion.in Nature Communications this week, the untethered, flexible robots could get to regions in the body surgeons currently find hard to reach, including the stomach and small intestine. They possess heating, shape-morphing, and rolling capabilities, the researchers said.
They are also able to release cargo onto the tissues, which could be used to deliver drugs in the future, by way of releasing magnetically held cargo.Readers who think they have the stomach for it can see a YouTube video of the little robots wriggling along a mock-up of an intestine which wouldn't look out of place on a 1970s
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