This Tiny Robot Snake is Made to Slither Through Your Brain

By Jennifer Walter
Aug 28, 2019 5:15 PMNov 19, 2019 3:25 AM
Brain-Snake-1024x729
The robot snake in a model of human veins. (Credit: Kim et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaax7329 (2019))

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You probably didn’t picture the robots of the future to be slimy, magnetized snakes. But a hyper-flexible robot modeled after the legless reptiles and designed by researchers at MIT could make it easier to diagnose and treat blood clots, aneurysms and perform other small-scale procedures in the brain.

The device, less than a millimeter thick, was designed to crawl through the narrow, twisting veins in our brains. In a study published today in Science Roboticsresearchers demonstrated that it can navigate through a model of a brain riddled with aneurysms – without getting stuck.

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