Q. What is the robot made of, and how does it work?

A. Our robot is made of an elastomer rubber, which is filled with many magnetic, small particles. We program the magnetic properties of these particles so that from outside, when we apply a magnetic field, the elastic sheath-shaped robot changes its shape to anything that we want.

Then it does all these different motions. When you look at this tiny thing crawling and jumping and all these things, it looks like a creature.

Where do you see work on this new robot heading? Where will future versions go?

One of the current major goals is to put this tiny soft robot into our digestive system or urinary system — and in the future, the vascular system — and for it to be able to navigate across all these complex tissues, surfaces which are fully filled with fluids or semi-filled, or no fluids.

If you look at the medical devices we have, the smallest ones are catheters, which are a millimeter in diameter, and they are always tethered. So our main goal in making tiny robots is to really access hard-to-reach or even not-possible-to-reach areas in our body with minimal invasion.

The robots already are small enough for our digestive system and urinary system. We’d like to go smaller, even down to tens of microns, so that we can reach almost anywhere inside your body.

And you think it could one day deliver drugs?

One of the functions we have been exploring is how to deliver a cargo, which could be drugs, inside the body. There are different ways. With a shape change, we can grab the cargo and then deliver it by opening the shape.

The second way is we make a small pocket on the robot that only opens with a special shape change that we can control.