The movie Fantastic Voyage, the story of a miniaturized team of doctors traveling through blood vessels to make lifesaving repairs in a patient’s brain, was pure science fiction when it came out in 1966. By the time Hollywood remade the film in 1987 as Innerspace, a comedy, real-world engineers had already begun building prototypes of pill-size robots that could voyage through a patient’s gastrointestinal tract on a doctor’s behalf. Patients began swallowing the first commercially built pill cameras in 2000, and since then doctors have used the capsules to get unprecedented views of places, such as the inner folds of the small intestine, that are otherwise difficult to reach without surgery.

One important aspect of Fantastic Voyage that has remained fantasy is the notion that such tiny pill cameras could maneuver under their own power, swimming toward a tumor to get a biopsy, checking out inflammation in the small intestine, or even administering drug treatments to an ulcer. In recent years, however, researchers have made great strides in converting the basic elements of a passive camera pill into an active miniature robot. Advanced prototypes, now being tested in animals, have legs, pro­pellers, sophisticated imaging lenses and wireless guidance systems. Soon these tiny robots may be ready for clinical trials. Right now they are testing the limits of miniaturized robotics.

This article was originally published with the title Robot Pills.

6 Comments

1. 1. asmaaragab 10:03 AM 7/25/10

   really I wrote a two science fiction stories about robot pills, I published them in a scientific magazine at 2003. one of that two stories talk about a robot that enter a human body to fight cancer by its special abilities . the second talk about a person called (doctor micron) whom take pills and be like micron man and enter to his patient's body and treat them.
   
   thanks for that excellent article.
   asmaa.ragab
   asmaa.therapy@yahoo.com

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2. 2. tmcatch711 09:48 AM 7/26/10

   Seems to me that given that blood flows or circulates through the body with certain arteries going to certain parts of the body that this could be an ideal guidance system.Also since there maybe wireless communication to the outside world and communication between robots it also could be that several if not many wireless robots could communicate to map an area of the body even if it were haphazardly initiated.There are other instances such as inhaling,injection,absorbsion and ingestion

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3. 3. jack.123 06:23 PM 7/27/10

   Using nanorobots injected in to the the blood stream could keep arteries and veins free of blood clots.

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4. 4. strawbot 11:28 PM 8/2/10

   I think there is another option not mentioned in the article for powering the little robots. Using the magnetic fields for power instead of manipulation, they could be used to deliver power to the internal robot, thereby giving it an endless supply of energy and not requiring any onboard batteries. As mentioned, the manipulation by magnetic fields is not ideal and self contained power supplies don't last long enough. Magnetic induction has been used in other products for clean power transfers. And since the robot is communicating over electro-magnetic fields, perhaps the power and transmissions could be merged reducing circuitry. The RF carrier would be a source of power as well as the medium for transmission.

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5. 5. Jose Antonio Santiago Montejo 05:52 PM 8/3/10

   Very good, is a good option to enter to human body at the same time to take picture with important information.

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6. 6. jean-francois rey 10:38 AM 8/18/10

   i just published the first clinical trail with an olympus -siemens guided capsule for stomach examination.the dream become reality (ENDOSCOPY,2010,42,541-545)
   JF Rey

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