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Tiny Robot Backflips through the Colon

A tiny rectangular robot developed at Purdue University  can travel throughout a colon to deliver drugs by doing back flips. The low-cost, magnetic microrobots are made of polymer and metal and are nontoxic and biocompatible. The robot could get a drug directly to its target site, without side effects like hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way. The researchers chose the colon for in vivo experiments because it has an easy point of entry and rough conditions that would prove its resilience. Since it is only the size of a few human hairs and too small to carry a battery, the microrobot is powered and wirelessly controlled from the outside by a magnetic field. “When we apply a rotating external magnetic field to these robots, they rotate just like a car tire would to go over rough terrain,” says researcher David Cappelleri.

Topics:
Automation Materials Medical Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 We've been working on these microscale tumbling  microrobots. So these are small little magnetic   bodies, which we can control using external  magnetic fields. Just like you have a car   tire to go over different rough  terrain, we can use that same   kind of modality to have these robots go over  rough terrain, dry surfaces, in wet surfaces,   up and down inclines. Our next step is, what kind  of real applications or biomedical applications   can we do with these robots. --There's  lots of potential applications for the   technology that Dave's lab has really been  pioneering. We picked something that we thought   would be easiest as a first demonstration  to start with, which is imaging the colon,   and thinking about GI issues. Because they're  small, it fit well inside even a mouse's colon.   And then we were able to see what reaction (and  really there wasn't much at all) the tissue had in  

    00:00:48 relation to these microrobots as they were moving  back and forth. --This is the first demonstration   of a microscale tumbling robot in vivo. We were  able to show that we can locomote, and we're able   to actually get the robots to move up and down  the colon very easily. So we're pretty excited to   show that we do have mobility in vivo with these  magnetic microrobots. --The fact that we could get   the robot introduced, manipulate back and  forth, localized to a specific location,   and then it would actually pass out naturally,  without any harm to the animal, I think was a   really great first demonstration of the biomedical  applications. Once we move up to large animals or   humans, I think you're going to be doing something  deeper into tissue, with maybe not just one,   but a dozen of these robots, and would be  watching these flip through a much larger colon.   Then you can think about multiple payloads, and  even targeting multiple sites. --There's nothing  

    00:01:37 here that I think we could individually do,  but together, we can really do something great.