Chinese scholars have constructed liquid metal magnetic micro-soft robots, which can enter narrow areas of the human body for diagnosis and treatment.

CTOnews.com, October 22, according to the Science and Technology Daily and the official account of the Shenzhen campus of Harbin Institute of Technology, Ma Xing, a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), and Jin Dongdong, an associate professor, recently built a liquid metal magnetic micro-soft robot, and the related results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

According to reports, the robot is expected to enter the narrow areas of the human body to carry out diagnosis and treatment tasks, especially in areas difficult to be reached by conventional medical methods, which has great potential for application in the field of biomedicine.

Compared with the rigid robot, this kind of robot has higher degree deformation ability and high flexibility, can change its shape and motion state according to the change of external magnetic field, and can better absorb energy when it encounters collision inside the human body. thus it can effectively make up for the difference of mechanical properties between machine and human, and has higher security.

In addition, this kind of magnetic micro-robot can realize a variety of large-scale controllable deformation and active and passive deformation, separation, fusion, migration and other motion behaviors by programming the drive and control of external magnetic field. At present, the team has verified the feasibility of the robot in the stomach environment under the detection of endoscope and X-ray imaging, which provides a strong support for the clinical application of liquid metal micro-robot.

CTOnews.com attached the findings of the team in the journal Nature Communications:

Original title: Reactive wetting enabled anchoring of non-wettable iron oxide in liquid metal for miniature soft robot