Meet the Tiny Origami Robots That Will Unfold in Your Stomach

Science often has a way of catching up with science fiction. While it never claimed the fan fervour of Star Trek, the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage offered a tantalizing promise: shrinking scientists down so they could extract information from a human body from the inside. MIT scientists haven’t gotten the shrinking figured out, but by making ingestible microscopic robots that can enter human organs, they’ve managed to get at least half of it down. The robots are based on the concept of origami. You take a capsule, and the robot unfolds itself into a more functional form. MIT first announced the development of these origami robots in 2014, with the hopes of making robots as small as possible. At the time, Daniela Rus, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, talked about how gaining control of the geometry of the robots was crucial to the project: “We can do the sequencing, we have a lot more control,” she said.

The construction of the robot 

That control is on full display in the latest developments from Rus and her team. “In our calculation,” says Shuhei Miyashita, a lecturer in electronics at the University of Yorkwith whom work Rus worked, “twenty percent of forward motion is by propelling water—thrust—and eighty percent is stick-slip motion,” a method of locomotion where the robot sticks to a surface through friction when it moves and slips free when it changes its weight distribution. “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.” Once inside the body, the robot unfolds to a rectangular design with accordion folds. Crucial to the robot’s success inside the body is the magnet at its core. Outside magnetic forces are used to steer the robot through intestines, and the magnet was also critical to the robot’s success in its test mission.

The size is small enough to be easily ingested 

The team got pig intestines from Boston’s Chinatown and used them to construct a synthetic stomach, in which they placed a battery. It was a realistic situation; there were a reported 11,940 incidents between 2005 and 2014 of children under six swallowing batteries. After navigating the robot with outside magnetic fields, the robot used its central magnet to grab the battery. It’s a system which is very reliant on outside observation, which is what Rus and her team are hoping to work on next. They are working on adding sensors to the robot, redesign the robot so it can control itself. Watch the video. So while the chances of humans shrinking down to get things out of your body are slim, at least something with physical autonomy could be pulling batteries out some time soon.