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 Robotics, researchers demonstrated that it can navigate through a model of a brain riddled with aneurysms – without getting stuck.
