Stretch, jump, wobble: the soft robots that scientists want to send on drug runs in the human body
- The CUHK-Carnegie Mellon team has built devices out of magnetised water that one day might be able to deliver drugs anywhere in the digestive system
- A droplet robot can be manipulated through complex tasks and split and reformed to fit through the smallest openings
The team, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, built the soft robots with ferrofluid – a liquid made up of magnetic nanoparticles suspended in a carrier fluid, such as water.
Using an external magnetic field, the scientists were able to control droplets of the fluid, making them stretch, jump, rotate, tumble, kayak and wobble.
The droplets can even form an artificial skin to wrap around an object and move it, according to the team’s findings, published in the December issue of peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.
The study’s lead author Zhang Li, from CUHK’s department of mechanical and automation engineering, is also the co-creator of a magnetic slime robot that made headlines in 2022 and uses similar principles.
The aim of both projects is to create miniature soft machines for biomedical applications, such as targeted drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery and cell transplants – something scientists have been trying to achieve for years.