An Edible Actuator for Ingestible Robots

Researchers have long been trying to make electronics that are safe to eat. These include edible transistors, sensors, batteries, electrodes, and capacitors, which (if you put them together) are most of an edible robot. What's been missing so far has been the thing that makes a robot distinct from a computing system, and that's an edible actuator that would allow an ingestible robot to actually do something useful once you've swallowed it. At IROS last week, researchers from EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, headed by Dario Floreano, presented a prototype of a completely edible soft pneumatic actuator made of gelatin. It probably doesn't taste very good, but it's biodegradable, biocompatible, and environmentally sustainable, and could enable all kinds of novel applications, as the researchers explain in their paper: The components of such edible robots could be mixed with nutrient or pharmaceutical components for digestion and metabolization.