Metallic but flexible robot thanks to its resemblance to an animal

The pangolin is a striking animal, resembling a walking pine cone, as it is the only mammal completely covered in hard scales. Scales are made of keratin, just like our hair and nails. The scales overlap and are directly connected to the underlying soft skin layer. This special arrangement allows the animals to curl up in case of danger, thus protecting their soft parts and exposing only the hard parts.

The team led by Ren Hao Soon and Metin Sitti, from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, has designed a metallic but flexible robot for which it was inspired by the pangolin’s ability to coil its scale-covered body in an instant. The roboticists took the animal as a model and developed a flexible robot made of soft and hard components that, like the animal, turns into a sphere in the blink of an eye, with the added feature that the robot can emit heat. when necessary.

The new robot measures no more than two centimeters and consists of two layers: a soft one, made of a polymer studded with small magnetic particles, and a hard one, made of metal components arranged in superimposed layers. So even though the robot is made of solid metal parts, it is still flexible and soft enough for use inside the human body.

When the robot is exposed to a low frequency magnetic field, the user can wind it up and move it in more than one direction. The metal pieces stick out like the scales of the animal, without damaging any surrounding tissue. Once rolled up, the robot can carry small loads, for example doses of medicine. The idea is that such a robot could one day travel inside the human digestive system and perform medical treatments at specific points.

Inspired by the pangolin, represented in the background, the roboticists have remodeled its external structure to devise the new robot, shown in the foreground. (Image: MPI for Intelligent Systems)

When the robot is exposed to a high-frequency magnetic field, it heats up to over 70 degrees Celsius thanks to the built-in metal.

Thermal energy is used in various medical procedures, such as treatment of thrombosis, stopping bleeding, and removal of tumor tissue.

Not depending on cables or tubes deployed from the outside, being able to move intracorporally, being made of hard parts and being capable of emitting heat, place this robot in a privileged position within medical robotics.

The research team exposes the technical details of their robot in the academic journal Nature Communications, under the title “Pangolin-inspired untethered magnetic robot for on-demand biomedical heating applications”. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)