Wednesday, June 27, 2007

We Heart Blood Vessel Robots

It gets a little tricky covering an exciting new technology when companies all over the world seem to be doing the exact same thing. And when it comes to your arteries and veins, everybody wants their product crawling through them.

We've had beads, robots, more robots, and now a 1mm size robot with mechanical "arms" that is controlled using an external magnetic field. Here's a bit from an article in Haaretz on the technology that's coming out of Technion University in Israel:

Scientists at the Technion University, teamed with a researcher from the College of Judea and Samaria, have developed a miniature robot that can move within the bloodstream.
...Oded Salomon, researcher at the medical robotics lab in the Technion's engineering faculty, added that the miniaturization achievement is unprecedented, as is the ability to control the robot's activity for unlimited periods of time, for any medical procedure.

For comparison, the diameter of a similar robot which researchers at Kyoto University developed is one centimeter. The Israeli robot's diameter is one millimeter.

The new robot consists of a hub from which tiny arms stretch out, allowing the robot to strongly grip the vessel walls. The operators can manipulate the robot to move in increments, and its special structure allows it to crawl within a variety of vessels with differing diameters.

Technion sure likes their swimming robots. It's always nice to see an article without a single reference to Fantastic Voyage. Well done!

Read the article here...

(Hat tip: Engadget)