Cyberplasm: Disease-Detecting Micro-Robot
Baku, April 4 (AZERTAC). US and UK-based researchers are working on a micro-robot designed to search inside the human body for signs of illness. Cruising along, it’ll supply key health data that could then be used to prescribe exactly the right drugs to a patient, if a condition’s found.
The robot under development is known as the Cyberplasm and, design-wise, it takes its cue from the sea lamprey - a fish with no jaw and a pretty rudimentary nervous system.
The Cyberplasm will have an inbuilt nervous system, sensors to give both a sense of sight and the ability to smell and glucose energy-powered man-made muscles. When exposed to heat, light or chemicals, these sensors will generate electronic impulses that are fed onto a central, brain-like structure. This brain will pick up on these and send out its own signals to the artificial muscles.
It’s this multi-layered process that will allow the Cyberplasm to move and self-navigate.
While the prototype Cyberplasm micro-robot will be no more than 10 millimetres in length, it’s envisaged that real, operational Cyberplasms could be a mere fraction of this size.
The Cyberplasm disease-detection robot programme is being progressed by the UK’s EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the US NSF (National Science Foundation), with Newcastle University’s Doctor Daniel Frankel heading the British contingent.
Among the other researchers working on the Cyberplasm programme are representatives of the University of Alabama, Northeastern University and MIT.
"Nothing matches a living creature’ natural ability to see and smell its environment and therefore to collect data on what’s going on around it", Frankel explained in a statement on the disease-detecting robot published on 29 March by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
"We’re currently developing and testing Cyberplasm’s individual components. We hope to get to the assembly stage within a couple of years. We believe Cyberplasm could start being used in real-world situations within five years", he said.
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