Design, Actuation, and Functionalization of Untethered Soft Magnetic Robots with Life-Like Motions: A Review

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in soft magnetic robots, highlighting bioinspired design and actuation strategies that enable life-like motions and potential biomedical and manipulation applications.

Contribution

It synthesizes current progress and explores bioinspired approaches to enhance design, actuation, and functional capabilities of untethered soft magnetic robots.

Findings

Soft magnetic robots enable untethered control and rapid response.

Bioinspired strategies can improve life-like motions in soft robots.

Applications include small-scale manipulation and biomedical fields.

Abstract

Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and can perform sophisticated tasks. Notably, soft magnetic robots exhibit unparalleled advantages over numerous soft robots (such as untethered control, rapid response, and high safety), and have made remarkable progress in small-scale manipulation tasks and biomedical applications. Despite the promising potential, soft magnetic robots are still in their infancy and require significant advancements in terms of fabrication, design principles, and functional development to be viable for real-world applications. Recent progress shows that bionics can serve as an effective tool for developing soft robots. In light of this, the review is presented with two main goals: (i) exploring how innovative bioinspired strategies can revolutionize the design and actuation of soft magnetic robots to realize various life-like motions; (ii) examining how these bionic systems could benefit practical applications in small-scale solid/liquid manipulation and therapeutic/diagnostic-related biomedical fields.