Ingestible Origami Robot Removes Swallowed Batteries

Ingestible Origami Robot Removes Swallowed Batteries

May 15, 2016 @ 10:53 | 

Imagine, by mistake you have swallowed a button battery; you really want it out as soon as possible. What are the options to bring out swallowed button batteries – surgery only? No, the researchers made a tiny robot to do this job without any surgery, the only thing patient have to do – swallow a capsule.

Researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot (reconfigurable robots that would be able to fold themselves into arbitrary shapes) that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

Prof. Daniela Rus, CSAIL MIT and her team (first author of paper Shuhei Miyashita, University of York, England) are presenting this new research work at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016) this week.

Every year, 3,500 swallowed button batteries are reported in the U.S. alone. Frequently, the batteries are digested normally, but if they come into prolonged contact with the tissue of the esophagus or stomach, they can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, which burns the tissue. Miyashita convinced Rus that the removal of swallowed button batteries and the treatment of consequent wounds was a compelling application of their origami robot.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care,” says Rus, who also directs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It’s really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether.”

Origami Robot Design and how it works?

This ingestible origami robot is the one of MIT’s origami robot series. This new Origami robot consists of two layers of structural material sandwiching a material that shrinks when heated. A pattern of slits in the outer layers determines how the robot will fold when the middle layer contracts.

Related Article: New Origami Robot: Climbs, Swims, and Carries Loads Twice its Weight

The movements of robot inside the stomach mainly rely on “stick-slip” motion, in which its appendages stick to a surface through friction when it executes a move, but slip free again when its body flexes to change its weight distribution. But because the stomach is filled with fluids, the robot doesn’t rely entirely on stick-slip motion. “In our calculation, 20 percent of forward motion is by propelling water — thrust — and 80 percent is by stick-slip motion,” says Miyashita. “In this regard, we actively introduced and applied the concept and characteristics of the fin to the body design, which you can see in the relatively flat design.”

It also had to be possible to compress the robot enough that it could fit inside a capsule for swallowing; similarly, when the capsule dissolved, the forces acting on the robot had to be strong enough to cause it to fully unfold. Through a design process that Guitron describes as “mostly trial and error,” the researchers arrived at a rectangular robot with accordion folds perpendicular to its long axis and pinched corners that act as points of traction.

Steered by external magnetic fields, Robot crawls across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. In the center of one of the forward accordion folds is a permanent magnet that responds to changing magnetic fields outside the body, which control the robot’s motion. The forces applied to the robot are principally rotational. A quick rotation will make it spin in place, but a slower rotation will cause it to pivot around one of its fixed feet. In the researchers’ experiments, the robot uses the same magnet to pick up the button battery.

The researchers tested about a dozen different possibilities for the structural material and demonstrated in a synthetic stomach having property of pig’s stomach.

 “This concept is both highly creative and highly practical, and it addresses a clinical need in an elegant way,” says Bradley Nelson, a professor of robotics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. “It is one of the most convincing applications of origami robots that I have seen.”


  • Explore FurtherTele-operation of Robot by Hybrid Hydrostatic Transmission
  • Image: “It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to healthcare,” Daniela Rus says. Pictured, an example of a capsule and the unfolded origami device.  ( Melanie Gonick/MIT)
  • Source: MIT news

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *