Successful microscale surgery enabled by mini-RCM

The mini-RCM is the result of a collaboration between Robert Wood, Ph.D. from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and Robotics Engineer Hiroyuki Suzuki of Sony Corporation.

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"The Wood lab's unique technical capabilities for making micro-robots have led to a number of impressive inventions over the last few years, and I was convinced that it also had the potential to make a breakthrough in the field of medical manipulators as well," Suzuki said in a statement. "This project has been a great success."

The lightweight robot is the size of a tennis ball and successfully performed mock surgical tasks, which are described in Nature Machine Intelligence.

To create their miniature surgical robot, Suzuki and Wood used the Pop-Up MEMS manufacturing technique developed in Wood's lab, in which materials are deposited on top of each other in layers that are bonded together, then laser-cut in a specific pattern that allows the desired three-dimensional shape to "pop up".