These Soft, Magnetic Robots May One Day Crawl Inside Your Body

Little robots controlled by magnets may one day be crawling through your body, delivering treatments or taking tissue samples. That's at least one use inventors at MIT envision for the soft, mobile devices they're currently creating to morph on cue. With just a wave of a magnet, the robots can roll, jump, and crawl around in confined spaces. In the future, the MIT team hopes to build a stronger, more intelligent version of this robot that can be used for tasks such as medical procedures or cleaning up radioactive waste. "We want to make the robot powerful, so we're designing new magnetic inks so they can deliver more force," says Xuanhe Zhao, a coauthor on a paper about the robots published today in the journal Nature.