Image: Melanie Gonick/MIT
It’s reported that every year, Americans swallow 3,500 button cell batteries alone. Whether swallowed on purpose or by accident, these batteries, mixed with the tissue of the esophagus or stomach, can induce an electrical current creating hydroxide that burns the tissue. MIT wants to solve this problem using a tiny origami robot that unfolds from a swallowed capsule and retrieves foreign objects from the body, among other tasks like patching up wounds.
Instead of surgically inserting the robot inside the patient’s body, the robot is inserted as a pill made from ice. The ice melts away once inside the stomach; the robot unfolds and is guided around using external magnets. Maneuverability is attained using a motion the researchers call “stick-slip” where the robot sticks to a surface through friction and then slips when flexing its shape. Stick-slip motion gives the robot traction to move forward while letting it slip to pivot. The dried pig intestine material is impervious to contact with the stomach’s gastric acid and is safe to use inside humans.
MIT researchers recently tested their origami robot on a pig stomach filled with water and lemon juice to simulate the stomach acid. They found that twenty percent of the robot’s forward motion is caused by propelled water and eighty percent is caused by stick-slip motion.
One hiccup the researchers discovered was the material’s malleability and ability to fully unfold. Being in pill form forces the robot to bunch, but when the pill dissolves, the robot is designed to unfold. Researchers say it was mostly hit and miss until settling on a design that could unfold properly while maintaining a certain degree of stiffness.
The current version of the robot is guided entirely by a magnetic field, but researchers hope they can add sensors to eliminate the need for external control, making the robot autonomously crawl inside a stomach.
Source: MIT
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