Posted by Pietro Valdastri on Friday, December 6, 2013 in News.

The STORM Lab research team will be presenting a proposal at the White House Smart America Challenge on Dec 12th to create an open testbed for research in miniature capsule robots (MCR) for medical applications.
An MCR is a biocompatible Cyber-Physical System (CPS) designed to operate in the human body to accomplish diagnostic or therapeutic tasks. A typical MCR has to fulfill three main constraints: safety, low power operation and small size. Advances in miniaturization of electronic devices have made MCRs a reality. However, MCRs operate in highly unstructured and delicate environments making them difficult to develop without expert level knowledge in multiple domains.
MCR may utilize multiple forms of locomotion to navigate inside the human body. They can also be made in multiple shapes and sizes with configurations that comprise a selection of sensors, actuators and communication modules. The resulting complexity of the system as well as the expense and the long development time has made this class of CPS (small, low power, fail-safe, multi-configuration) unapproachable to a wide community of researchers. Our integrated design and simulation environment aims to reduce and ultimately remove this barrier by abstracting domain expertise behind a predefine set of hardware and software components. In addition to managing complexity in miniature medical devices, the design environment that is the focus of this project contributes to CPS research by providing a simulation tool that can be used to study the interaction of an MCR with the surrounding environment (e.g., the gastrointestinal tract). The project also makes available open source hardware and software component libraries to the MCR community that would make building MCRs more accessible.