This Tiny Robot Walks, Crawls, Jumps and Swims. But It Is Not Alive. (30SCI-TAKE) (30SCI-TAKE)

I like the name "Wiggly"

So so cool!

Is it still a "robot" if you have to control it manually from moment to moment? Doean't a robot imply some autonomy, even if it is just preprogrammed to carry out one set of steps?

This is inspirational!! Thanks for spotlighting this work!

Ro-, ro-, ro- your -bot, gently down bloodstream Magically, medically, magnetically Bot life is a dream.

you can call it a tape worm....

Truly incredible. The future is here, just not evenly distributed yet.

A company called Medrobotics developed a surgical robot based upon the flexibility of snakes. This robot named Flex navigates to portions of the body that could never be reached to perform minimally invasive surgery. The scientific founder, Professor Choset from CMU's Robotic Institute was also inspired by nature. It strikes me that nature frequently inspires our great innovators.

Magnetic shape control can be useful for creeping into limited spaces such as joints to seal leakers, squirming into the cochlea, swimming through the vitrious humor to push detached retina into place before laser stitching...

Absolutely fascinating. The future is now.

Interesting technology. I believe a commentator's fear of military applications is unwarranted. What you're not seeing in the video is the external equipment to generate the strong magnetic fields needed to control these robots. The system to control these robots when introduced into the human body will be extremely complex requiring position feedback and likely a large physical platform. Think MRI- or CT-sized machinery.

How about a large population of vanishingly small differentiated robots that stay in the body in perpetuity & whose job it is to eternally scavenge & make harmless concentrations of free radicals, break up plaque in arteries, get rid of eye floaters, & work with the immune system, teaching it about cancer & the like??

What is life as we know it on Earth past and present continues to evolve. The purpose of life as we know it is to perpetuate itself over time, place and space by all evolutionary fit means necessary. Our scientific technological hubris far exceeds our moral, legal, socioeconomic, political and educational structural monuments. Determining the nature of life is as difficult as determining the biological DNA genetic nature of intelligence in the one and only human race species that evolved in Africa 300,000+ years ago.

What about the potential military use of this. It is terrifying.

It is unfortunate that NYT articles about President Trump routinely generate thousands of comments, while this incredibly-fascinating piece — with profound implications for the future of health, medicine, war / defense — has generated a grand total of one comment as of this writing. Fascinating article, NYT!

John Von Neumann had an answer to that question at a seminar at the IAS in Princeton in the late 1940s.

To paraphrase, he noted we already have lots of humans, who predictably make certain types of errors, and we don’t particularly need or want more.

What we’re trying to do is produce machines that aren’t people, that will do stuff people can’t or don’t want to do, hopefully with fewer errors.

I would warn that we don't yet know how the small particles will react in the same field as the size in the prototype. As particles get smaller, different fields begin to have more effects.

That's what I took away from quantum mechanics. Does any physicist or chemist want to disagree?

Monica Australia -
Absolutely brilliant research, resulting in this incredibly agile micro robot - I am in awe of those people who develop these brilliant concepts!

I think it should be called a “Gumbot.”

This does still depend on the skills and intentions of scientists, but what happens when the robots can make the decisions? Is the world possibly headed for perfection?