Release date: 2016-05-17
At the International Robotics and Automation Conference held this week, international research teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom demonstrated a small folding robot that can be loaded into capsules. And relying on an external magnetic field to drive crawling on the stomach wall, which can remove foreign matter attached to the stomach wall and repair tissue wounds.
According to the MIT website on the 12th, this small robot was an upgraded version last year, but the appearance and structural design have been very different. It is rectangular in shape and has accordion folds that can be filled into capsules for swallowing. After the capsules are dissolved, the robot can be fully deployed. The center of the pleats has a permanent magnet that can be moved with changes in the external magnetic field to control the movement of the robot.
The new generation of robots is made of a layer of structural material sandwiched with a layer of heat-shrinkable material. The middle layer is made of dried pig casings for sausages. The outer layer is engraved with a specific pattern. When the middle layer is contracted by heat, the outer layer determines how it folds. . It adheres to the stomach wall by the friction of the contact point and automatically advances in a "adhesive-relaxing" manner.
Daniela Ruth of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) said that in vivo applications require a small, controllable and unrestricted robotic system that is difficult to control with a wire tie. . This ability of folding robots has potentially important application value in the healthcare field.
The original CSAIL postdoctoral Sue Miasia said that because the stomach is full of liquid, the robot can't completely move by sticking. According to the calculation, the liquid thrust is about 20% when the robot advances, and the other 80% is moved by the stick. Therefore, the new generation of robots are designed to have a "fir" feature and are relatively flat. They used silicone to create a model of the intersection of the stomach and esophagus, mixed with water and lemon juice to simulate gastric juice. In the experiment, the robot removed the button cell attached to the simulated stomach wall under the control of the magnetic field.
In the United States alone, 3,500 cases of accidental swallowing of button batteries were reported each year. When the battery is in contact with the esophagus and the stomach wall for a long time, an electric current is generated, and the generated hydroxide will burn the tissue. If someone accidentally swallows the battery, it really needs to get it out as soon as possible. Brad Nelson, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, said the design is highly innovative and practical, solving the clinical problems in a concise way.
The concept of robots is very broad – from robotic robots on industrial production lines to bionic robots, from beautiful robots with human form and relative behavior, to capsule robots that are oriented to perform a single task. And enough. But change is inseparable from its ancestors - serving humanity. From the perspective of development trends, robot miniaturization is an important independent branch, mainly used for medical and physiological research in the human body. This kind of robot has an operating bottom line - that is, it must not produce a "secondary disaster"!
Source: Science and Technology Daily - China Science and Technology Network
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