New robot designed to walk inside the gut

WASHINGTON: From the chest-burster in Alien to the bellybutton bot in The Matrix, most of us are a wee bit squeamish about the whole thing-crawling-around-insideyou experience.

And if thoughts of parasites playing poker in your body cavity already keep you up at night, this article probably isn’t for you – because scientists are working on a robot that can walk around inside your gut.

Not just for fun, of course. Modern surgery techniques allow doctors to perform complex tasks with the smallest of incisions, reducing pain and recovery times.

However, there are obvious drawbacks to these techniques – namely visibility.

That is why researchers at the University of Leeds are working on a robot small enough to enter the body through the same hole used for laparoscopic surgeries.

The robot would be the surgeons’ man on the inside – a crawling camera used to guide other instruments.

Researchers have looked to nature for inspiration.

“Tree frogs have hexagonal patterned channels on their feet that when in contact with a wet surface build capillary bridges, and hence an adhesion force,” said lead researcher, Professor Anne Neville.

“It is the same kind of idea as a beer glass sticking to a beer mat, but the patterns build a large number of adhesion points that allow our robot to move around on a very slippery surface when it is upside down.”

Researchers are working to trim the prototype down to just 20x20x20mm. Eventually, the bot will be equipped with cameras, lights and perhaps even some surgical tools. – Washington Post-Bloomberg