There are permanent updates in the field of surgical robots, scientists hoping to develop the perfect devices that could help save more lives and improve living conditions for patients. The latest innovation would be a wasp-inspired surgical robot that could easily insinuate itself into tissue and collect data about it.

A team of scientists at the Imperial College London, which includes Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, decided to develop a device that gets its inspiration from the structure of the Siricidae family of wasps. The female wood wasps of the Siricidae family use a needle-like ovipositor to deposit eggs inside pine trees. This has two dovetailed shafts, each covered in backward-facing teeth.

 

To bore into wood, the wasp rapidly oscillates each shaft backwards and forwards. As the shaft is pulled backwards, its sharp teeth catch in the wood's tissue and prevent it from retreating, so with each oscillation, the ovipositor takes a small step forward. The tension created by the gripping teeth braces the shaft and prevents the needle from buckling or breaking.

 

Basically, what the team wants to do is mimic this mechanism to create a medical probe. They have already developed a prototype silicon needle consisting of two shafts with 50-micrometre-long fin-shaped teeth. Motors oscillate the two shafts to propel the device forward the same way as the wood wasp's ovipositor.

 

Preliminary tests have showed that the device can crawl across the surface of brain-like gels and burrow its way into pig muscle tissue. The team will present the probe at the ROBIO conference in Bangkok, Thailand, in February.

 

Unlike existing rigid surgical probes, the device will be flexible enough to move along the safest possible route, bypassing high-risk areas of the brain during surgery, for example. It could also reduce the number of incisions needed to deliver cancer therapies to different parts of a tumour, as it can burrow its way to hard-to-reach areas.

 
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