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Photo by: MIT News
Photo by: Medifit Biologicals
TINY ORIGAMI
ROBOT REMOVES
SWALLOWED
BATTERIES AND
MARBLES A ROBOT DID A
SURGERY WITHOUT
THE HELP OF ANY
DOCTOR
Good news for parents
and toddlers everywhere.
No need to worry about
young kids accidentally
swallowing a battery or a
marble. Scientists from MIT,
the University of Sheffield
and Tokyo Institute of
Technology have developed
a robot that can remove
eaten batteries and marbles. something with potential
important applications
to health care. 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.” It’s an ingestible origami
robot that unfolds itself from
the capsule as soon as it
enters the stomach. It crawls
along the stomach wall and
detects the small object
and wraps itself around it,
then remove it. Scientists
also makes it possible for
the robot to help in healing
wounds inside the digestive
system. This small robot works
without wires since it can
be controlled by magnetic
waves. It is encased in a
piece of ice so that it can
be swallowed easily. It’s not new that robots have
assisted doctors in medical
operations and surgeries, but
recent experiment indicates
that robots alone can do
the job themselves – yup,
with the doctor no longer
in the operating room. This
is what can be derived from
an experiment with an
autonomous robot named
Smart Tissue Autonomous
Robot or STAR, who made
surgical stitches with pigs.
Composed of a robotic arm,
a suturing tool and imaging
technologies, STAR operates
using a computer program
which has the intelligence
to perform surgical practices,
especially stitches.
Professor Danial Rus, leader
of the group behind this
origami robot and director
of MIT’s Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (CSAIL), said:
“It’s really exciting to see our
small origami robots doing
Every year, around 3,500
small
batteries
are
swallowed by toddlers. If
not removed immediately,
it can cause stomach
lining burns.
tools that are intelligent,
whether autonomous or
semi-autonomous, you can
make outcomes better.”
Surgeons have the tendency
to have tremors during
operations, which robots
do not have. This is what
autonomous robots can
offer far more than the
humans: consistency. Having
autonomous robots in
operating rooms can reduce
human errors and improve
efficiency, surgical time and
access to quality surgeons
in some of the 44.5 million
soft-tissue surgeries in the
United States a year.
It was found out that the
robots were as good as, if
not better, than the stitches
made by skilled surgeons.
Peter Kim, the study’s senior
author, believes that if robots
can do it on pigs, they can
also do it to human patients.
He said, “The main message
is that by giving surgeons
JULY 2016
Future Cities & Robotics
13