Ben-Gurion University researchers are working on creating an ingestible snake-like robot that can navigate through the small intestine for a robotic colonoscopy.

The tiny, swallowable robot, deemed SAW (single actuator wave-like robot), moves in a wave motion and is able to move through the environment of the small intestine.

“The external shape of the robot is a 2D projection of a rotating helix,” said David Zarrouk, one of the robot’s inventors and head of the Bio-Inspired and Medical Robotics Lab at BGU, in a press release. “We can simply reverse the direction by reversing the direction of the rotating motor.”

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