As he prepared to swallow his robot for the first time, Torrey Smith’s doctors warned that the battery was his greatest threat.
If the capsule came apart and the battery burned the tissue lining his stomach, it would only be the beginning of a very bad experience.
“I was just hoping that we would get any kind of a positive signal that we were on the right track,” Smith, co-founder and CEO of Endiatx, said of the June 2020 test. “At that time, our radio bandwidth was so limited. We were pushing 48 pixels square of grayscale, not even color, at just a few frames per second. The worst video quality you could imagine — but it was real.”
The PillBot prototype’s inaugural journey into Smith’s gastrointestinal tract was a success, beaming live footage from his stomach without anesthesia, sedation, recovery time or air pumped into his gut to inflate it.
“It almost looked kind of like the surface of the moon with that grayscale,” he said. “But then we saw a dangling piece of tissue sloughing off from inside my stomach in real-time, and I literally shouted. Even with the extreme limitations of that revision, we were on to something.”