Inexpensive 'GPS' for Flexible Medical Robots

Roboticists at UC San Diego  have developed an affordable, easy-to-use system to track the location of flexible surgical robots inside the human body. The system performs as well as current state-of-the-art methods, but is much less expensive. The researchers embedded a magnet in the tip of a flexible robot that can be used in delicate places inside the body, like arterial passages in the brain. The researchers then used existing magnet localization methods, which work a lot like GPS, to develop a computer model that predicts the robot’s location.