The magnetically actuated robot has valuable potential in biomedicine, bioengineering, and biophysics for its capability to precisely manipulate particles or biological tissues. However, the deformability of rigid robots with predetermined shapes is limited, which constricts their functions and causes inconvenience for robots' movement in constricted space. In this study, we proposed a feasible and efficient ferrofluid-based robot for the transportation of tiny particles and blocks. In addition, a method to generate a patterned magnetic field is also introduced to model a ferrofluid-based robot with an adaptive shape. Benefiting from the paramagnetism and fluidity of the ferrofluid-based robot, it also demonstrates outstanding motion accuracy and output force on a superhydrophobic surface. Because of its excellent motion characteristics, high motion accuracy, and high measured output force, the proposed ferrofluid-based robot has great advantages in the field of microoperation. The correlation coefficient between the motion trajectory of the ferrofluid-based robot and the motion trajectory of the micro-stages is 0.9967. The position error is less than 1.5% of the total stroke.

This paper presents a semi-automatic actuation system which can achieve bio-particles tracking, transportation, and high-precision motion control of robots in a microfluidic chip. This system is mainly applied in magnetically driven robots. An innovative manta ray-like robot was designed to increase stability of robots in a non-contaminated manipulation environment. A multilayer piezo actuator was applied to generate high-frequency vibration to decrease the friction between robots and the glass substrate. We also set up a user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) and realized robot tracking and predetermined trajectory motion through excellent algorithms using Python and C++. In biotechnology, precise transportation of cells is used for the enucleation, microinjection, and investigation of the characteristics of a single cell. Being optimized, the parameters of the robot can effectively reach 10 µm in actuation precision and a maximum actuation speed of 200 mm/s.