ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Reconfigurable multifunctional ferrofluid droplet robots.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bioinspired Adaptive Surfaces for Intelligent Liquid Manipulation: Progressing From Passive and Active to Hybrid Strategies.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Review
- Miniature Soft Robot With Magnetically Reprogrammable Surgical Functions.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Fish-diversity-inspired multiple soft millirobot system with morphology-encoded selective control.Science advances · 2026Article
- A reconfigurable dielectric elastomer actuator via phase-transitional ferrofluid enables sustainable operation.Science advances · 2026Article
- Embodying physical computing into soft robots.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Fluidic torque-enabled object manipulation by microrobot collectives.Science advances · 2026Article
- Enable active mobility of untethered miniature robots in high-resistance multiphase medium.Science advances · 2026Article
- A wireless implantable sensory ring for continuous airway stent migration tracking.Npj flexible electronics · 2026Article
- Synthetic X‑ray‑driven tracking and control of miniature medical devices.Nature machine intelligence · 2026Article
- Articulated Untethered Magnetic Actuators for Multimodal and Cross-Scale Operations.Cyborg and bionic systems (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Swarm coordination of fish-like magnetic soft robots: directed aggregation and shape-adaptive attachment toward efficient drug delivery.National science review · 2025Article
- Magnetic Fluid-Driven Vine Robots for Minimally Invasive Tissue Biopsy Sampling.Advanced intelligent systems (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2025Article
- Advances in Wettability-Engineered Open Planar-Surface Droplet Manipulation.Micromachines · 2025Review
- Toward Wireless Implantable Robotic Systems Driven by Magnetic Field for Personalized Therapy.Advanced robotics research · 2025Article
- Particle-armored liquid robots.Science advances · 2025Article
- Magnetic Cell-Mimetic Droplet Microrobots with Division and Exocytosis Capabilities.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Ferrofluid droplet generation on a zero-thickness nozzle by a magnetic field using a wedge-shaped functional surface.PloS one · 2025Article
- Adaptive Ferrofluidic Robotic System with Passive Component Activation Capabilities.Cyborg and bionic systems (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Heterogeneous multiple soft millirobots in three-dimensional lumens.Science advances · 2024Article
- Wearable and Implantable Soft Robots.Chemical reviews · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Magnetically actuated miniature soft robots are capable of programmable deformations for multimodal locomotion and manipulation functions, potentially enabling direct access to currently unreachable or difficult-to-access regions inside the human body for minimally invasive medical operations. However, magnetic miniature soft robots are so far mostly based on elastomers, where their limited deformability prevents them from navigating inside clustered and very constrained environments, such as squeezing through narrow crevices much smaller than the robot size. Moreover, their functionalities are currently restricted by their predesigned shapes, which is challenging to be reconfigured in situ in enclosed spaces. Here, we report a method to actuate and control ferrofluid droplets as shape-programmable magnetic miniature soft robots, which can navigate in two dimensions through narrow channels much smaller than their sizes thanks to their liquid properties. By controlling the external magnetic fields spatiotemporally, these droplet robots can also be reconfigured to exhibit multiple functionalities, including on-demand splitting and merging for delivering liquid cargos and morphing into different shapes for efficient and versatile manipulation of delicate objects. In addition, a single-droplet robot can be controlled to split into multiple subdroplets and complete cooperative tasks, such as working as a programmable fluidic-mixing device for addressable and sequential mixing of different liquids. Due to their extreme deformability, in situ reconfigurability and cooperative behavior, the proposed ferrofluid droplet robots could open up a wide range of unprecedented functionalities for lab/organ-on-a-chip, fluidics, bioengineering, and medical device applications.
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