Corkscrew-shaped microbot could use sound to spiral through human body

Sound can propel a microscopic robot shaped like a piece of pasta through artificial blood vessels, which could eventually lead to a new way of delivering drugs inside the human body. You can feel the sound from a large speaker in your body because the mechanical vibrations of the sound waves penetrate organic tissue. Daniel Ahmed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and his colleagues want to use this phenomenon to move a tiny robot inside the human body. The robot looks like a 350-micrometre-long piece of corkscrew-shaped rotini pasta – a design that Ahmed says was inspired by the shape of certain bacteria. The robot does not have any motors or internal power source.