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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.
Zhang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.