Researchers in Japan just created a tiny, amoeba-inspired robot

To disengage the clutch, the researchers shine the molecule with a different light, and the cell-like robot stops moving. The effect is a tiny blob that flails and moves under human control, in a manner not unlike that of an amoeba. This is a robot whose movement starts and stops on a researcher's command, but the direction of that movement isn't yet something the team can really steer. In the paper, the researchers contemplate changing the robot's tiny, spherical body into a more asymmetric one, or configuring DNA that responds in specific ways to specific environments, so the robot can move more reliably towards environmental signals. "From a robotics point of view," the authors write in the paper's discussion section, "we believe that designing molecular devices and integrating them into a system will be an important means of realizing a programmable and controllable function for engineering applications."