This tiny
robot is made out of gelatin which can crawl inside your intestinal tract and
deliver medicine
Edible robots
are on the way. Researchers from Intelligent Systems Laboratory at Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland are working on a tiny edible
and digestible robot, made out of gelatin, which can crawl inside your
intestinal tract and deliver medicine.
These robot actuators
are described as components in machines that are responsible for movement. But
unlike metal parts, these actuators are made out of edible gelatin that are
filled with air or fluid or react to chemicals, which cause them to move.
Combining these actuators with other advancements in edible electronics -
batteries that can safely pass through a digestive tract or chips and cameras
that are already on the market that can be ingested - could one day make for a
fully edible robot, researchers told Recode. These robots will prove to be
beneficial as they are capable of moving inside a patient's body to deliver
medicine. They are roughly three to five centimetres in length. Two of these
actuators put together could create a gripper. These actuators could also be
used in food transportation where the robot does not require any additional
payload because the robot is in fact, the food. Christopher Bettinger, a
biomedical engineering and materials science professor at Carnegie Mellon, told
Recode, “The wind in the sails that will take anything [in edible electronics]
forward is identifying the exact problem first and designing solutions to
tackle that problem. So, maybe the pieces are there, but it's kind of up to the
private sector to synthesise them to actually make products.” The gelatin-based
actuator is still in early stages of development. However, researchers are
teaming up with a hospitality school named École hôtelière de Lausanne to
develop these tasty robots!
Source:DNA-17th March,2017
