We’ve seen snake robots and, of course, tons of surgery robots (including the weird lamprey-bot), but Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says we’ll soon have fully untethered snake-type robots that will crawl through the human body, assisting with all kinds of fixes and maintenance.
There are lots of easily imaginable use cases–a snakebot for heart surgery would require only a small incision, rather than a wildly invasive slice for traditional surgery. One day, reports the AP, they may “be able to test chemicals or blood in the body, or even the electrical connections in nerves.” Now we just have to get past the Indiana-Jones-ooginess of a tiny robosnake squirming its way through our bodies.