It is a fact of life that young children will swallow just about anything they can get their hands on, including dangerous objects like magnets and batteries. Often these objects must be removed through invasive surgery, but a team of engineers from MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Tokyo may have developed a better solution in the form of a tiny robot that can fold up into the size of a pill.

According to the researchers, the robot is swallowed in pill form and then unfolds inside the patient’s stomach. It is then steered by external magnets toward the foreign object, which it then detaches from the stomach’s lining so that it can be purged naturally.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care,” Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), said in a statement. “For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It’s really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether.”

The robot’s structure is composed of “dried pig intestine used in sausage casings,” which explains why it sort of looks like a piece of bacon.

The applications for this sort of ingestible robot are numerous and extend beyond simply removing swallowed batteries, but in its current form, the robot is incapable of the fine controls necessary for more complicated surgeries.

Still, with 3500 reported cases of swallowed batteries in the US each year, the team’s tiny little bacon robot could become an important lifesaving tool.

You can watch a video of the robot in action below:

Image courtesy of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology