Origami robot can retrieve swallowed battery

If you are a parent there is a chance you might have to deal with your child swallowing a battery at some point. According to a study, about 3,300 incidents are reported annually in the US alone.

Well, fear no more, an international team of researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield in the UK and the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan have developed an ‘origami robot’ that your child would swallow. Once inside the stomach the robot would unfold and retrieve a single-cell battery, even patching wounds.

How it works is an attached magnet to the robot seeks out the battery using magnetic fields. Two layers of structural material maintain the robots shape with a layer of dried pig intestine (same used for sausage casing) in between that shrinks when heat is applied. Openings in the outer layers allow them to fold inwards when the intestine contracts.

This allows the robot to move along similar to an inchworm’s movement. But it also can swim as stomachs contain liquid as well.

The device was tested in a synthetic stomach that was created and modelled after that of a pig’s. The research team is presenting the origami robot at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Sweden running May 16-21.

Original article from Cnet