Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Swallowable robot
A Carnegie Mellon engineer is in the early stages of adding legs to a camera-in-a-pill that doctors currently use to see inside the intestine. Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is putting a three-footed system through its paces in pig intestines. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Link (via Howard Lovy's NanoBot)In the simplest scheme, the capsule could deploy three legs, creating a tripod that could stop the capsule's movement through the intestine, giving doctors a chance to take a closer look at something.
Polymer pads on the leg tips, mimicking the adhesive foot pads of the palmetto beetle, would stick to the intestinal walls. The adhesive foot pads require very little pressure, yet enable the beetle to withstand forces of more than 200 times its body weight.
A more elaborate, telescoping capsule, featuring a set of three legs on either end, would enable it to crawl as if it were inchworm. The capsule could thus go rapidly to a point of interest or, if sufficient power was available, move upstream to give doctors a second look at a suspicious lesion.
posted by David Pescovitz at 08:37:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
