Scientists create tiny robot that works like an animal and swims around your body

Machines could access hard-to-reach regions such as the stomach and small intestine

Scientists have created a tiny robot, inspired by a pangolin, that could swim around the body.

The soft robot is able to drop off cargo, heat up, stop bleeding and more, scientists say. One day it could be put into people’s body and do those things in hard-to-reach places, such as the stomach and small intestine, they suggest.

For now, the robot has only been tested on practice tissue, and its creators stress that further testing is still required. But those experiments showed that the robot was able to heat up to 70 degrees Celsius, perform medical treatments on tissue in ways that could be useful for treating cancer or stop bleeding, and dropping off drugs, creators said.

Scientists have long hoped that magnetic soft robots made out of soft metals could be useful for medical procedures, by allowing them to navigate around the body without surgery or other invasive procedures. The work has struggled, however, because the safety and functionality of the robots as they have been developed has been limited.

In an attempt to address those problems, researchers turned to the pangolin, a mammal covered in scales that have meant they have become threatened by poaching. The scientists looked to use those scales for good, however, finding inspiration in the fact that they are wrapped in a hard armour that nonetheless lets them move flexibly and without issue.

They are able to do so because those rigid scales fit together in an overlapping structure that lets them slot over the top of each other. And so scientists did the same with their new robots.

The creations, known as millirobots because of their tiny size at 1 cm by 2 cm by 0.2 mm, use the same kind of overlapping scale design. And they are able to heat, change shape and roll around, not unlike the pangolins they are inspired by.

The work is described in a new paper, ‘Pangolin-inspired untethered magnetic robot for on-demand biomedical heating applications’, published in Nature Communications.