Plumbers could soon be sending miniature robots off to inspect your pipes. Jinwan Lim at the Korea Aerospace University in Goyang, South Korea, and colleagues have developed a 10-millimetre-wide robot, equipped with a tiny camera, that can crawl through domestic pipes like a caterpillar. The complicated pneumatics used to propel previous wormbots made them too large for narrow pipes, but the new robot needs only a single air line to power its “inching” motion (Mechatronics, in press).
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