Non-invasive diagnoses and treatments that won't require doctors to cut up patients in surgery are the ultimate goal in medicine. Currently, there are numerous studies delving into the possibility of people ingesting self-assembling snake-like robots. There's already an ingestible pill manufactured by an Isreali company, Given Imaging, which can take pictures. However, taking pictures of one's innards is only the beginning. Currently, a collaboration of researchers called ARES is studying how multiple robotic pills could merge together inside the stomach.

The ultimate goal is to have each single pill perform its own special function. For example, one pill is designated to take pictures while another is designed to deliver medicine and still another to take tissue samples. Developing individual pills with different functions would be useless if they can't assemble inside the stomach (they're to be swallowed individually), so that's what's currently being explored. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich chose magnets for preliminary tests that yielded up to 90 percent accuracy in assembly. Aside from stomach-bots, finding the right assembly material and method could lead to other types of robots such as those for search and rescue. You just throw a few pieces of robot modules in tight spaces and wait for them to assemble and do their job.