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Tiny Ingestible Origami Robots: Coming Soon to a Microsurgery Near You

The tiny little microsurgeons of the future are coming.

Coming to a microsurgery inside you. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT

A busy surgeon's second in command might soon be a tiny ingestible origami robot.

Researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have teamed up to create a micro origami bot that once swallowed, can unfold itself from a capsule. Steered by external magnetic fields, it can crawl across a pig's stomach wall, patching wounds or removing swallowed button batteries as it goes.

The findings were published this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and builds on the team's previous research: a teeny origami terrestrial bot that unfolded itself, carried goods, and swum before self-destructing.

"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," Daniela Rus, who directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), said in a press statement.

The main challenge is designing these origami robots to be biocompatible. So to demo how their robot worked, the researchers tucked it inside a tiny ice capsule, which travelled down the oesophagus into the pig's stomach. As the ice capsule melts, the robot unfolds to action mode and gets to work removing foreign objects—in this case, a button battery—from the body.

Next up, the researchers want to try out in vivo experiments, add sensors to the body, and redesign the robot so that it can move autonomously.