Tiny tentacled robots can pick up ants and lasso tiny blood vessels during surgeries
A new robot, developed by engineers at Iowa State University, is only a centimetre wide, with tentacles so thin and delicate that it can pick up small and delicate objects. This type of robot could eventually be used in microsurgery, especially in procedures that require doctors to manipulate blood vessels that can result in aneurisms if they are punctured.
Those other octopus-inspired robots are fine and all, but there are lots of things they can’t do. They’re all too thick to coil themselves tightly, and they manipulate tiny objects with about as much precision as a bulldozer. But a new robot, developed by engineers at Iowa State University, is only a centimeter wide, with tentacles so thin and delicate that it can pick up small and delicate objects. The study about the robot was published today in Scientific Reports.

Conformal winding around Mallotus villosus egg. Paek et al, Scientific Reports, 2015

The robotic tentacle is actually a microtube made from a stretchy polymer called an elastomer. Because it’s so thin, the tentacle can curl up to just 200 microns in diameter. But it can also pick up and move things without crushing them, like an ant, as seen above. Or it can grasp fish eggs, which normally burst when pinched with tweezers:

Conformal winding around Mallotus villosus egg. Paek et al, Scientific Reports, 2015

This type of robot could eventually be used in microsurgery, especially in procedures that require doctors to manipulate blood vessels that can result in aneurisms if they are punctured.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

This article was written by Alexandra Ossola from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.