Robotics is becoming more and more popular with each passing year as demand for efficient and cost-effective solutions rises.
With robotic technology offering convenience and improved safety and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning, allowing for more advanced robotic capabilities, it’s no surprise that the global robotics market is expected to surpass $200 billion by the end of this decade.
Another evidence of robotics’ growing usage is the global installation of industrial robots, which reached 541,302 in 2023, the second-highest annual installation in history. The record was made the year before that when 552,946 units were installed.
With that, the total number of operational robots has now reached a new high of around 4.3 million units worldwide, with Asia leading this growth at 70%, followed by Europe at 17%, and then America at 10%. As for robot manufacturing, Japan is in the lead, accounting for a 46% market share.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), robotics growth will accelerate in 2025 and will continue at this speed in the years to come.
Now, when it comes to industries that are driving robotics’ massive expansion, automotive is in the lead, with electronics, metal and machinery, waste management, agriculture, retail, construction, and food services being other sectors utilizing robots.
Robots in Healthcare
While robots are being used across industries, there is one sector where it has a far greater and more positive impact, and that’s medicine. The global medical robotic systems market is actually fast-growing, and it is estimated that its size will increase from $16 billion in 2024 to $33.8 billion by 2029.
Robots are being used in all areas of healthcare, from supplying medications and assisting in rehabilitation to helping with diagnostics, surgery, and drug delivery.
For instance, robotic arms are used for mixing, dispensing, counting, and inspecting, while programmed supply robots are used to deliver items to specific locations.
These autonomous mobile robots are simplifying routine tasks for healthcare professionals by reducing the physical demands on human workers and addressing staffing shortages. They even keep track of inventory and make sure all the supplies are always in stock when needed, in addition to sanitizing rooms and getting them ready for patients.
By taking up all these routine tasks, autonomous mobile robots allow medical staff to focus on patients and their specific needs that can’t be met by the technology. The robot called Tug from Aethon is one such example that comes with the capability to move through challenging conditions to make safe deliveries to where they are needed and when they are needed.
These robots also help create a safe work environment by handling the tasks of cleaning, disinfection, and transporting supplies to hospitals and regions where there’s a risk of pathogen exposure.
According to the CDC, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection on a given day. This is due to hospitals’ inability to disinfect rooms completely. To help address such problems, automated robots like FDA-authorized Xenex are being built that use pulsed UV rays to sterilize hospital rooms in just minutes.
Technological innovation has also led to advanced surgical-assistance robots that help surgeons achieve greater speed and more accuracy when performing complex operations.
A multi-armed wonderbot called da Vinci Surgical System is one such robot used to make surgery less invasive, reduce surgical errors, and provide enhanced control. The Cyberknife is another one that treats cancers by delivering radiation therapy to tumors with extreme precision.
Then there are pharmaceutical robots, which are gaining a lot of traction because of the aging population and those with chronic diseases that require ongoing medication and precision treatment. By automating critical processes that are usually done manually and are time-consuming, pharmaceutical robots further help improve quality and precision.
Robots for Drug Delivery
Driven by technological advancements and the increasing need for automation in drug development and patient care, robots are making drug delivery more efficient and precise, improving patient care.
Companies are developing micro and nanorobots that move independently to deliver drugs to hard-to-reach areas powered by chemical reactions or external sources like light, electric fields, or magnetic fields. By targeting disease sites, these robots improve therapeutic efficacy and reduce side effects.
A couple of years ago, a team of researchers developed MANiACs, which are tiny tumbling robots having magnetic nanorods encased in a soft spherical shell. Back in 2022, a Stanford mechanical engineer built multifunctional wireless robots for the same.
And just a couple of months ago, NTU Singapore researchers developed grain-sized soft robots for targeted drug delivery. The robot, which is made with magnetic microparticles and controlled using magnetic fields, can transport as many as four different drugs and release them in reprogrammable doses and orders.
This research was built on the team’s previous work that involved magnetically controlled miniature robots that can grip tiny objects and swim through tight spaces, among other complex movements.
Taking inspiration from a 1960s sci-fi movie, ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ where a crew shrunk to cell size to repair damage in a scientist’s brain, the research is bringing imagination to reality.
The highly dexterous robot, when tested in lab experiments, moved at speeds of between 0.30 mm and 16.5 mm per second, successfully delivered drugs in more challenging environments, and even after eight hours of constant movement, showed minimal drug leakage.
The NTU team is now looking into making these robots even smaller so they can ultimately be used to treat bladder cancer, brain tumors, and colorectal cancer.
Microbots: Tiny Robots That Revolutionize Precision Medicine
Microrobots utilize miniaturized sensors and actuators to carry out actions that they are programmed to do. Their micron size makes them easy to use in environments that have been traditionally too intricate and difficult to reach. This ability makes these robots invaluable for minimally invasive surgery, disease diagnosis, detoxification, and precision drug delivery.
However, they are not without their challenges in terms of their efficacy and localization through deep tissue.
Another major issue is that they have proved to be more show than substance. Over the past two decades, several versions of micro- or nanorobots have been released, but so far, their applications in living systems have been rather limited. Then there’s the fact that moving objects with high accuracy in complex biofluids like saliva, urine, and blood is also pretty complex.
Other obstacles for nanorobots include real-time detection within the body and achieving precise remote control for targeted therapy.
Also, when designing these microbots, the question arises of whether they should be tethered or untethered. For an untethered microrobot to operate effectively in the human body, it must have steady propulsion through biofluids, strong payload capacity, high biocompatibility to avoid surgical removal, enhanced imaging for real-time visualization, and precise targeting.
Here, acoustically actuated robots are showing substantial potential due to the benefits of deep-tissue penetration, non-invasive operation, rapid response, robust propulsive forces, and safety.
So, researchers from Caltech introduced BAM — a hydrogel-based, imaging-guided, bioresorbable acoustic microrobot that can navigate the human body with high stability. BAM is not a metal humanoid or bio-mimicking robot, it is a tiny bubble-like sphere.
According to co-corresponding author of the paper on bots, Wei Gao, who’s a professor of medical engineering at Caltech and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator:
“We have designed a single platform that can address all of these problems.”
In their research, the scientists noted that when tested, the bots helped the team successfully deliver therapeutics that decreased the size of bladder tumors in mice.
“Rather than putting a drug into the body and letting it diffuse everywhere, now we can guide our microrobots directly to a tumor site and release the drug in a controlled and efficient way.”
– Gao
As BAM technology progresses, the study anticipates the device will make a substantial impact on the healthcare sector and patient care.
The Design & Development of BAM
The new microrobot, which has spherical microstructures, is made of a hydrogel called poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate. Hydrogel starts in liquid or resin form, but when the network of polymers within them becomes cross-linked, it becomes solid.
Having such composition and microstructure allows hydrogels to retain large amounts of fluid, helping the team overcome the problem of robots being biocompatible. Meanwhile, additive manufacturing fabrication enables the outer sphere to carry the therapeutic cargo to a target site within the body.
The microstructures and hydrogel recipe were made with the help of Julia R. Greer, the co-corresponding author, and Ruben F. and Donna Mettler, Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics, and Medical Engineering.
For this, her group made use of two-photon polymerization (TPP) lithography. In this 3D printing technique, a laser is used to create complex structures. Here, ultra-fast pulses of infrared laser light are used to selectively cross-link photosensitive polymers while following a specific design.
The TPP lithography basically builds a high-resolution structure layer by layer, allowing the team to achieve complex forms and high precision. The group was able to print (write) microstructures that are roughly 30 microns in diameter, which is the same as human hair.
Talking about the sphere shape of the structure, Greer noted that it is “very complicated to write” and requires having a knowledge of “certain tricks of the trade to keep the spheres from collapsing on themselves,” so it’s a huge achievement that the team was able to create them.
“We were able to not only synthesize the resin that contains all the biofunctionalization and all the medically necessary elements, but we were able to write them in a precise spherical shape with the necessary cavity.”
– Greer
This is the inner structure of the sphere, and as for its outer structure, the microrobots will incorporate magnetic nanoparticles and the therapeutic drug within it in their final form.
The magnetic nanoparticles allow the researchers to control the robots and direct them to a location that they want using an external magnetic field. And when they finally reach the target, the robots stay in that location, and the drug spreads out passively.
When it comes to the microstructure’s exterior, the team further designed it to be hydrophilic, which means it is attracted to water. Doing so makes sure that the individual robots do not stick together as they travel through the body.
Unlike the microrobot’s exterior surface, the inner surface is not made hydrophilic but rather hydrophobic because it needs to capture an air bubble, which is easy to dissolve.
To build a hybrid microrobot whose exterior attracts water while the interior repels water, the team designed a chemical modification.
This modification involved two steps; the first one involved affixing long-chain carbon molecules to the hydrogel, effectively making it hydrophobic. In the second step, the scientists utilize the oxygen plasma etching technique to remove the carbon structures from the exterior, making the outside hydrophilic.
Calling their chemical modification “one of the key innovations of this project,” Gao stated that the asymmetric surface modification was what really allowed them “to use many robots and still trap bubbles for a prolonged period of time in biofluids, such as urine or serum.”
As per the team’s demonstration, this technique allowed bubbles to last for several days as opposed to a few minutes otherwise.
Now, just why do we need to trap these bubbles in the first place? Well, having trapped bubbles is necessary to move the robots and to keep track of them with real-time imaging.
To enable the microrobot to move forward, the researchers have the sphere with two cylinder-like openings. The team found that having two openings allowed the robots to move in various biofluids at greater speeds than a single opening.
When exposed to an ultrasound field, the bubbles within the robot vibrate, causing the fluid surrounding it to stream away from it, propelling the robot through the fluid.
The bubble, which is trapped in each microstructure, acts as a great ultrasound imaging contrast agent, allowing for bots’ real-time monitoring in vivo.
The team then put the microrobots on trial as a drug-delivery tool in mice having bladder tumors. In 22 days, four deliveries of therapeutics were made with the help of microrobots. These deliveries were found to be more successful in reducing the size of tumors than the ones that didn’t make use of robots. According to Gao:
“We think this is a very promising platform for drug delivery and precision surgery. Looking to the future, we could evaluate using this robot as a platform to deliver different types of therapeutic payloads or agents for different conditions. And in the long term, we hope to test this in humans.”
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Investable Company in Medical Robotics Sphere
Now, let’s take a look at a prominent company in this space:
Intuitive Surgical (ISRG +0.51%)
This $186.6 billion market cap company is known for developing, manufacturing, and marketing the da Vinci surgical system and the Ion endoluminal system. Intuitive Surgical’s products and services enable improved patient outcomes.
Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (ISRG +0.51%)
At the time of writing, its shares are trading at $517, up 55.3% YTD, while having an EPS (TTM) of 6.2 and a P/E (TTM) of 84.22. For Q3 2024, the company reported $2.04 billion in revenue, an increase of 17% from the same quarter last year.
During this period, the worldwide da Vinci procedures jumped by about 18% compared with 3Q23, and its installed base grew to 9,539 systems, with Intuitive Surgical placing 379 such systems. The company also obtained regulatory clearance for the system in South Korea.
Conclusion
Robotics is gaining a lot of attention all over the world and across industries. The demand for robots in healthcare is particularly strong and growing thanks to their ability to streamline clinical workflows, assist in surgery, reduce the risk of infection, and provide a safer environment and high-quality patient care.
The latest research happening in nanorobots, as we noted today, demonstrates a medical breakthrough that can change the healthcare industry by treating conditions that are not only difficult but may even be impossible. This certainly paves the way for improved therapies and a healthier future.
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