The use of robots in medical care is really gonna open up

a whole caste of diagnostics and therapies

that otherwise were not accessible.

What I wanna do is create intelligent tools

that would allow a person with less medical training

perform the kind of repairs and diagnostics

that surgeons in the past otherwise had to do.

My research group does a lot of work on snake robots.

These are highly-articulated mechanisms

that can thread through tightly-packed volumes

and get to locationss that people

and machinery otherwise can't access.

So what we wanna think about is

how can we apply these robots to surgery?

One day I just said to myself, I'm gonna figure out

how to build a small, surgical snake robot

and 20 minutes, the idea came to me.

I figured out to manipulate cables so all the motors

can be as big as you want offboard

and by marionnating these cables,

we can steer this snake robot wherever we go.

It's rigid in that it can hold its shape

but it's flexible in that it can go in and around

organs without disturbing surrounding tissue areas.

Right now, if we need to have something repaired,

we undergo open surgery, and that's

very invasive, very risky, painful, costly.

The idea is, instead of having a large incision made,

a couple of small incisions are made

that you can enter it and then drive around your body

in a minimally invasive way without disturbing

the surrounding tissue, and get to the target

where you can deliver your therapy or perform a diagnostic.

The implication of this is that you no longer need

to be in a hospital, we can now perform

some of these procedures as office visits.

We've had three successful human cases.

We operated on a person who otherwise would have required

months of recovery, two weeks of hospital stay.

Instead, she went home the next day, no complications.

There are many next steps for this project.

Conceiving new ideas, overcoming technological challenges,

these are all frustrating, how to make the robot smaller,

that's a frustration that I sleep with almost every night.

But it's because of those frustrations,

it's because of those needs, we advance the technology.

(inspiring music)