Howie Choset, a rambunctious roboticist who has been working on snake-like robots for decades at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new, ultra-slim snakebot that can crawl inside a small incision and perform surgery on your heart or excise prostate tumors. It has been successfully tested on pigs, and will now be used in human trials.
With Choset’s snakebot, the surgeon makes a keyhole incision, and then feeds the snake into it. The surgeon uses a remote control to guide the snake to the damaged/diseased organ (no doubt causing skin undulations a la Alien), where it then extends its miniature tools and gets to work.
While exact specs are hard to come by, Choset says the diameter of the robot’s head is less than that of a US dime (18mm). The robot has 102 joints, a camera in the head, and can slither around your organs with amazing precision. If you’ve ever seen a large snake slither around its human handler, it’s a lot like that — only on a much smaller scale. For some (fairly graphic) photos of what the snakebot looks like in action, hit up Choset’s BioRobotics website. Embedded at the end of the story is a video of an older snakebot working its way into a pig.
While we’ve spent a lot of time writing about humanoid robots, doggy packmule robots, autonomous quadcopter robots, and even the science of falling in love with robots, medical robots are possibly the most important sphere of robotics. For over a decade now, surgeons have been using robotic hands, arms, and snakes to visit places that their hands simply can’t reach without making a huge incision. With robotic surgery, incisions are smaller, operations are shorter (and thus cheaper), and patients recover faster. Robotic hands, which the surgeon simply grips in his own hands to remove hand shakes and increase flexibility, are very commonly used.
Moving forward, it’s important to note that this snakebot is tethered — it uses an external power source and its movements are entirely controlled by the surgeon — but we’re now only a few years away from untethered bots that crawl freely around your anatomy. First these will undoubtedly be wirelessly controlled by the surgeon, but it’s only a matter of time until they become autonomous, small enough to wiggle around your vasculature, and eventually garner the prestigious title of “nanobots.”
Read more at Phys.org