The robot doctor will come and get into your belly.

This could be a strange scene: On a cold night in October 2006, a group of engineering students and their Professor Sylvain Martel gathered in the classroom to watch a crippled pig on a nuclear magnetic resonance machine, holding their breath, and finally the classroom rang with enthusiastic applause ...

A hospital technician implanted a ball of ball-point balls into a pig's carotid artery through a catheter, and a few minutes later saw the ball of steel on the computer screen suddenly move. That's what the team wants to see. This is the first time that humans have put objects in a radio-controlled way into the blood vessels of organisms, a historic advances for the micro-robotics world, comparable to the first time humans landed on the moon.

Now the world's research institutions are trying to develop this small step more, engineering micro-robots will one day be able to implant biological arteries and blood vessels, and then farewell to the need to use invasive surgery in the era.

The robot doctor will come.

Martel wrote: "The first feat of the development of micro-robots in medicine will be to treat cancer, the robot can directly input drugs into cancer cells, it will only hit the damaged cells, does not harm healthy cells."

But while the future of development is bright, its challenges are immense. It contains a lot of physical problems, such as how to get a certain size of a robot through a viscous fluid filled with large arteries and small blood vessels, and biological problems, such as making sure that the robot material is non-toxic and can be decomposed by the organism.

Eric Diller, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, said: "These robots need to be made very small, but they cannot simply shrink existing robots in proportion." "Researchers have sought inspiration from nature by using a bionic design that resembles a bacterium to make miniature robots.

He said that the living environment of micro-objects is very different from the ordinary objects, if a micro-object in the water, the water will look very deep, so to make the swimming objects unique. Then came the thought of the bacterium, which made a tiny body with giardia, which is very different from a fish swimming in a container.

Earlier this year, Diller's team had a breakthrough: they made a millimeter of robots. The robot has two arms and can be controlled by a magnetic field, so it can bypass the organism. Diller says micro-robots are not only a promising way to transport drugs, they can also repair our blood vessels and organs.

Muscle robot

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduate Caroline Cvetkovic is working on a similar project: A muscle-driven walking robot. Her team uses heart cell electrical pulses to harness small robots, which are made from hydrogels.

Cvetkovic conceived a "robot doctor Who can help transport drugs, intelligently implant blood vessels, and monitor the environment in an organism." "Our system is inspired by mammalian muscles, tendons, and bone systems," she said. Not only is it related to physiology, it allows us to imitate the natural system of energy production. In the human body, for example, when the muscles Act, the force passes through the tendon to the bone. And in our bio-robot, when muscle cells react (usually through electric shocks), the force passes through a special connection to the body. The connector is composed of hydrogels, so it is flexible to bend. As a result, robots can move limbs to walk. “

Robert Woods, an electronics engineer and founder of Harvard's Miniature Robotics lab, is confident about the future of micro-robots. He is dedicated to the production of disposable robotic bees, which are capable of pollination, search and rescue, and the ability to troubleshoot dangerous materials. "If you want to make a flying robot, all kinds of flying creatures in nature can give you a lot of inspiration," he said. But we cannot simply replicate nature, and we are trying to understand the movements and behaviors of various creatures and apply them to our research projects. ”

Just last week, a team of European and Israeli scientists came to the news: their scallop robot production has made great strides. (see "This miniature robot can swim" in human body) The scallop robot is very small, only fraction mm, so it can swim in the human eye. The real initiative of the team is that the robot can swim without the help of an external force. Although like other micro-robots, it needs to be controlled by an external magnetic field, but as soon as the force is input, it can swim automatically without any other force traction.

Back in 1949, the Nobel laureate in physics, Feynman, said in his speech: "If you can swallow a surgeon, the surgery will become interesting and simple." But how can we make such tiny surgeons? This is my dream, I leave it to you to realize. ”

Scientists have struggled for decades. Dreams are not far away, and even more fascinating, people will not simply swallow a surgeon, but rather implant a micro-robot doctor directly. Today's robots are much more miniature than Feynman's, and perhaps the future of robots will be even more miniature than we think.