 The use of robots in medical care is really going to open up a whole cast of diagnostics and therapies that otherwise were not accessible. What I want to do is create intelligent tools that would allow a person with less medical training to perform the kinds of repairs and diagnostics that surgeons in the past otherwise had to do. My research group does a lot of work on snake robots. These are highly articulated mechanisms that can thread through tightly packed volumes and get to locations that people and machinery otherwise can't access. So what we want to think about is how can we apply these robots to surgery? One day I just said to myself, I'm going to figure out how to build a small surgical snake robot. And 20 minutes later, the idea came to me. I figured out a way to manipulate cables so all the motors can be as big as you want off-board. And by marinating these cables, we can steer this snake robot wherever we go. It's rigid in that it can hold its shape, but it's flexible and that it can go in and around organs without disturbing surrounding tissue areas. Right now, if we need to have something prepared, we undergo open surgery and that's very invasive, very risky, painful, costly. The idea is instead of having a large incision made, a couple of small incisions are made that you can enter in and drive around your body in a minimally invasive way without disturbing the surrounding tissue and get to the target where you can deliver your therapy or perform a diagnostic. The implication of this is that you no longer need to be in a hospital. We can now perform some of these procedures as office visits. We've had three successful human cases. We operated on a person who otherwise would have required months of recovery, two weeks of hospital stay. Instead, she went home the next day, no complications. There are many next steps for this project, conceiving new ideas, overcoming technological challenges. These are all frustrating and how to make the robot smaller, that's a frustration that I sleep with almost every night. But it's because of those frustrations, it's because of those needs, we advance the technology.