A Colonoscopy Robot and Other Weird Biomedical Tech From IEEE's Biggest Robotics Conference

A host of bizarre biomedical robots turned up at ICRA 2017, IEEE's flagship robotics conference, which took place earlier this month in Singapore. We saw swallowable robots that poke the stomach with needles and worm-like robots that explore the colon. Equal parts unnerving and fascinating, these bots aim to help people--perhaps in ways we hope we never need. This capsule robot innocuously tumbles around inside your stomach--until it reaches suspicious-looking tissue. Then, like an EpiPen on steroids, the soft-bodied bot whips out a needle and jabs that spot inside your stomach in ten fast pumping movements.