A child swallows a battery every 3 hours. This remarkable pill-sized origami robot could remove the

[HuckleB]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/13/a-child-swallows-a-battery-every-3-hours-this-remarkable-pill-sized-origami-robot-could-remove-them/

"After 1-year-old Emmett Rauch ate a lithium battery, he began vomiting blood, prompting a visit to critical care and emergency surgery. A doctor would later compare the toddler’s throat to the scene of a detonated firecracker. It took years and dozens of procedures to reconstruct Emmett’s windpipe before he could breathe on his own.

Across the United States, a child swallows a battery once every three hours, according to one pediatric estimate, equal to about 3,300 cases annually. Based on emergency reports, the vast majority of swallowed batteries turn out to be button cells — the squat silver disks of electrochemical energy, used in hearing aids and TV clickers. Although deaths from swallowing button cells are very rare, serious complications, like what happened in Emmett’s case, can arise when a battery is caught in a child’s throat.

Thanks to recent research spearheaded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, small robotic devices could one day be used to retrieve swallowed objects, including batteries. Though the new robot wouldn’t be able to perform major esophageal surgeries, it could, possibly, patch smaller wounds in the stomach. The only thing a patient would have to do, in theory, is swallow — a bit like gulping down a spider to catch a wayward fly.

In a proof-of-concept experiment demonstrated at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the small device folds into an ice capsule about the size of a gummy bear. When the ice thaws inside the body, the robot unfurls as though it were a piece of origami filmed in reverse. Once flattened, the origami robot wriggles around the stomach, controlled by human operators using an external magnetic field. This is not the first device to borrow properties from origami, now a popular source of inspiration for engineers.

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