Bugbot, a robotic tourist in your intestines

There are already wireless pill cameras that can send back images of your innards whilst on holiday there, and separately developed pills containing robots that aim to take up hiking in your gizzard. Now scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are working on a robotic camera that combines those two tastes that taste great together. It'll still be another couple of years in development, but the prototype is an 800nm six-legged robot capable of inchworm-like intestinal locomotion (Kylie Minogue would be proud), small enough to be attached to the pill camera already available. Doctors would be able to then control the movements of the camera once ingested, enabling a much finer degree of photographic control inside the patient. Very cool, though we don't need to get all Innerspace, ourselves — we'd be happy to settle for something we could drop behind the couch that could tell us where our Treo stylus has rolled off to.