Nature provides a successful evolutionary direction for single‐celled organisms to solve complex problems and complete survival tasks – pseudopodium. Amoeba, a unicellular protozoan, can produce temporary pseudopods in any direction by controlling the directional flow of protoplasm to perform important life activities such as environmental sensing, motility, predation, and excretion. However, creating robotic systems with pseudopodia to emulate environmental adaptability and tasking capabilities of natural amoeba or amoeboid cells remains challenging. Here, this work presents a strategy that uses alternating magnetic fields to reconfigure magnetic droplet into Amoeba‐like microrobot, and the mechanisms of pseudopodia generation and locomotion are analyzed. By simply adjusting the field direction, microrobots switch in monopodia, bipodia, and locomotion modes, performing all pseudopod operations such as active contraction, extension, bending, and amoeboid movement. The pseudopodia endow droplet robots with excellent maneuverability to adapt to environmental variations, including spanning 3D terrains and swimming in bulk liquids. Inspired by the “Venom,” the phagocytosis and parasitic behaviors have also been investigated. Parasitic droplets inherit all the capabilities of amoeboid robot, expanding their applicable scenarios such as reagent analysis, microchemical reactions, calculi removal, and drug‐mediated thrombolysis. This microrobot may provide fundamental understanding of single‐celled livings, and potential applications in biotechnology and biomedicine.
Swarming robotic systems, which stem from insect swarms in nature, exhibit a high level of environmental adaptability and enhanced tasking capabilities for targeted delivery and micromanipulation. Here, we present a strategy that reconfigures paramagnetic nanoparticles into microswarms energized by a sawtooth magnetic field. A rotary-stepping magnetic-chain mechanism is proposed to address the forming principle of disk-like swarms. Based on programming the sawtooth field, the microswarm can perform reversible transformations between a disk, an ellipse and a ribbon, as well as splitting and merging. In addition, the swarms can be steered in any direction with excellent maneuverability and a high level of pattern stability. Under accurate manipulation of a magnetic microswarm, multiple microparts with complicated shapes were successfully combined into a complete assembly. This reconfigurable swarming microrobot may shed light on the understanding of complex morphological transformations in living systems and provide future practical applications of microfabrication and micromanipulation.
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