Miniature Soft Robot With Magnetically Reprogrammable Surgical Functions

Magnetic miniature robots are untethered actuators, which can prospectively make existing minimally invasive surgery considerably safer and painless, and enable unprecedented treatments because they are much smaller and dexterous than existing surgical robots. However, such actuators are restricted to possessing at most two on-board functionalities, having limited five degrees-of-freedom (DOF) locomotion, or are only operational under specialized environments where actuation from strong external magnets must be at very close proximity (<4 cm away). Here we present smart magnetic composites with deliberately engineered symmetry and heterogeneous material properties. Leveraging these composites, we construct a millimeter-scale soft robot whose magnetization profile can be reprogrammed to dispense drugs, cut through biological tissues, grip and store biological samples, and heat remotely. By possessing full six-DOF motions, including the sixth-DOF rotation about its net magnetic moment, our soft robot can also roll and two-anchor crawl across challenging unstructured environments, which are impassable by its five-DOF counterparts. Because the applied magnetic fields are relatively uniform and weak (10-30 mT, 0.21-0.31 T/m for actuation; 60-65 mT for reprogramming), they can theoretically penetrate human tissues safely and enable actuation beyond 5 cm.