A team of researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois have produced a soft robot that manoeuvres with the help of light and magnetic fields.

According to an article on The Engineer this robot, which is 10mm in size, has four legs and can pick up particles and cargo in an underwater or aquatic environment such as a water tank.

The robot is partly made out of filaments of nickel, but its structure is primarily filled by water itself. Once the robot has access to light, it comes to life and is able to move with the additional aid of a magnetic field and without any of the traditional, complex hardware associated with other robots.

This innovation has led the team to speculate future aims for the robot, which include the team creating ‘armies of microrobots’ which would carry out tasks in a coordinated manner.

“We can tweak them molecularly to interact with one another to imitate swarming of birds and bacteria in nature or schools of fish in the ocean. The molecular versatility of the platform could lead to applications that have not been conceived at this point”, said Samuel Stupp, who is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University.