Tiny electromagnetic robot runs fast and reforms after being squished

A squishy robot smaller than a postage stamp can run 70 of its body lengths every second – more than three times faster than a cheetah, relative to its body size. "It is really, really fast and, to be honest, that was a little bit of a surprise," says Martin Kaltenbrunner at Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria. "We actually bought a better version of a high-speed camera during the experiment because the one we had wasn't good enough." He and his colleagues made the ultra-fast soft robot out of a rubbery material and controlled it with electric currents and a magnetic field. They hope it will eventually be used in medicine, for delivering drugs or performing procedures inside the human body. The robot is made of an elastic material curled into an upside-down U-shape with embedded metal wires running through it.