Sound‐Based Assembly of Magnetically Actuated Soft Robots Toward Enhanced Release of Extracellular Vesicles

Abstract

Magnetic soft robots have emerged as promising tools in biomedicine due to their wireless actuation, rapid response, and compatibility with biological systems. Despite the various innovative strategies proposed for their fabrication, they suffer from complex processes and limited cellular compatibility. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore alternative approaches that are fast, mild, and highly tunable. Herein, a novel fabrication strategy for contactless assembly of soft‐robots is introduced for the first time. This technology exploits hydrodynamic instabilities at the free surface of a fluid layer, thus enabling the fabrication of centimeter‐scale robots featuring diverse structural properties. These features show a wide range of deformation modes in response to magnetic fields, including folding, bending, and expanding. Furthermore, the design and assembly of novel actuators with customized shapes as fish‐ and butterfly‐like structures is shown. The fabricated patterns exhibit different modes of motion under the influence of uniform magnetic fields. As a proof of concept, an innovative application of this technology combined with the proposed soft robots is represented by the enhanced release of extracellular vesicles. Altogether, this novel fabrication method along with the newly developed magnetic soft robots enables the manufacturing of high‐performance, multifunctional, and cytocompatible intelligent systems.