Medical robotics have evolved from interventions being performed by relatively large robots
outside the patient to smaller untethered versions such as the camera pills for operations inside the
digestive track. But despite these recent technological advances, many types of medical interventions
are still out-of-reach to such modern medical robotic systems. More recently, a new class of untethered
robots has emerged. These robots are miniaturized further to target regions in the human body only
accessible through smaller diameter blood vessels and as such, they could play a more critical role in
many medical applications. Tumor targeting is an obvious example where robotics being applied to
miniature untethered carriers capable of transporting drugs can play a major role by offering an
improved concentration of therapeutic agents at the targeted area and a decrease of systemic side effects
compared to modern interventions such as chemotherapy. But to be successful, such class of robotics
must as nanomedicine did, consider nanotechnology to implement critical functionalities aimed at
enabling new target therapies or at least to improve many existing medical interventions. This new field
of robotics referred here to as medical nanorobotics would therefore achieve such goal by embedding
and exploiting nanometer-scale components and phenomena within the context of robotics. In this
chapter, the nanoparticles being among the simplest nanometer-scale components to be embedded in
such miniature robots will be used as an example to initiate the readers with the powerful concept of
nanorobotics and how it can affect future medical practice and in particular, endovascular target
interventions.
Keywords: Nanorobot; camera; drug transportation; endovascular; magnetic nanoparticles; drug delivery
and targeting; tumour delivery; functional; magnetic fields.
