Swallowed a battery? This ingestible origami robot will get it out

Getting to the root of the problem has never looked quite like this, medically speaking. Thanks to the latest innovation from the minds at MIT, there is now a tiny origami robot capable of performing internal surgery after being swallowed by a patient. As the MIT News Office reported, a collaboration amongst researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology gave way to this minuscule device, ingested by way of a capsule and steered by external magnetic fields, that can "crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound." "It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," said Daniela Rus, lead researcher on the study and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether."