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A robot made of magnetic slime with a custard-like consistency can navigate narrow passages, grasp objects and fix broken circuits. It could be deployed inside the body to perform tasks such as retrieving objects swallowed by accident.

Elastic robots capable of manipulating objects and fluid-based robots that can navigate tight spaces both already exist, but robots combining both properties are less common.

at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues mixed neodymium magnet particles with borax, a common household detergent, and polyvinyl alcohol, a kind of resin, to form a slime that can be controlled by an external magnetic field. They then added a silicon compound that coats the magnetic particles to make them non-toxic for use in the human body.

The team then tested the robot in different scenarios, such as encapsulating a lost battery in a model stomach, moving with a piece of wire it had grasped and squeezing through millimetre-sized gaps.

The slime appears to transition between tasks easily, as well as self-heal when cut into bits. 鈥淵ou can first elongate it to a very large extent so it looks like a liquid. Then afterwards, you can roll it like an octopus鈥� arm to carry something,鈥� says Zhang.

Before it can be used inside people, we need a way to track the slime in the body, says at the University of Leeds, UK. 鈥淚f you want to control something inside the body to do a specific task, you have to know where the [robot] is and how it鈥檚 performing,鈥� he says.

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It would also need to be thoroughly tested to make sure that the magnetic particles, which are toxic by themselves, can鈥檛 escape the robot鈥檚 slime. 鈥淭hey need to verify safety with future trials, but it鈥檚 definitely a sound approach,鈥� says Valdastri.

While the slime currently moves slowly, at a speed 鈥渃omparable to an insect鈥�, according to Zhang, modifying the magnetic control mechanism could increase this speed in future. Further work could also focus on making the slime work autonomously, says Zhang.