They make difficult surgery far more accurate.
Robotic bugs will be swallowed or injected into blood vessels and/or your digestive system to fix a variety of ailments. "
Robotic" muscles propel these scientific wonders. Super computers and technology have helped to advance a robotic bug from science fiction to reality. Projecting a small current remotely enables these miniature machines to move about the human body.
Doctors would be armed with MRI body scans of the patient taken in advance to help them navigate the robot.
Robotic bugs will placed within the digestive tract, where it could be
used to seek out and treat cancers of the oesophagus or bowel. In tests
on animals the robots have performed very well.
These robotic bugs have the ability to perform treatment inside the
body,
eliminating the need for surgery in some cases
Miniature robots are able to move through the body would be particularly useful to
investigate and treat tumours in hard-to-reach parts of the body, such
as sections of the bowel.Tiny hooks on their legs allow some models to navigate surfaces like the human gut without slipping. Also a special clamp allows doctors to stop it altogether if
they spot something of concern and need to take a closer look.
Indications are that this will be far less uncomfortable than a colonoscopy or gastroscopy
in which the intestine is inflated, causing much pain to the patient.
Medical nanobots are still in development stage and only a few models are being tested presently. It will not be long before this technology will be as common place as a gps unit in your vehicle.
Nano technology
Medical molecular machines are not likely to appear in the clinic soon,
there's a decent amount of research going into the development of
nanoscale robotics,
and not only for therapeutic use. One could easily imagine these
widgets appearing in diagnostic assays and nano-scale manufacturing. Luckily, molecules that can crawl already exist in nature.
Kinesin,
for example, is a protein that crawls along microtubules in our cells -
hitch a bit of cellular cargo to it, and it'll go along for the ride.
If you can't crawl, you're going to have to swim. Again, nature is ahead of us with the flagellum - basically, a propeller for microbes.
The adaptability and motility of these bacteria are a few of the reasons why researchers are using them as inspiration for their own devices and working to modify them to deliver drugs to cancer cells, and perhaps heart disease follow. If it's not bacterial in origin, don't be surprised if the world's first medical nanobot is sperm-propelled.
Stories of artificial helpers and companions and attempts to create
them have a long history, but fully autonomous machines only appeared
in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable
robot, the
Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Today, commercial and
industrial robots
are in widespread use performing jobs more cheaply or more accurately
and reliably than humans. They are also employed in jobs which are too
dirty, dangerous, or dull to be suitable for humans. Robots are widely
used in
manufacturing,
assembly, and packing; transport; earth and space exploration; surgery;
weaponry; laboratory research; safety; and mass production of consumer
and industrial goods.