Tomorrow's surgery: micromotors and microrobots for minimally invasive procedures

Surgical procedures have changed radically over the last few years due to the arrival of new technology. What will technology bring us in the future? This paper examines a few of the forces whose timing is causing new ideas to congeal from the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, micromachining and smart materials. intelligence systems for autonomous mobile robots can now enable simple, insect level, behaviors in small amounts of silicon. These software break-throughs, coupled with new techniques for micro-fabrication of miniature sensors and actuators from both silicon and ferroelectric families of materials, offer glimpses of the future where robots will be small, cheap and, potentially very useful to surgeons. In this paper we relate our recent work with small mobile robots and in fabricating piezoelectric micromotors, in an effort to develop actuator technologies where brawn matches the scale of the brain. We discuss our experiments with thin film piezoelectric ultrasonic motors 2 mm in diameter and larger versions, machined from bulk ceramic, 8 mm in diameter. We also sketch possible applications in the surgical field and discuss larger scale prototypes for intestine crawlers.