A Chinese and German collaborative team developed a soft, tiny robot with a spring-like structure that can sense, grasp and move.

The biocompatible machine capable of manipulating in a single cell offered a potential strategy in precision medicine, such as microsurgery and targeted drug delivery, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, and Chemnitz University of Technology fabricated the magnetic spring system, an extremely sensitive one that can deform at a micron scale driven by minuscule strain.

The robot was inspired by some cells and microorganisms that use biological springs to perform actions such as sensing, predation and driving.

"The system in a nanoscale size shows a sensitivity equivalent to one-thousandth of the gravity of a single cell," said Xu Haifeng from SIAT, the corresponding and first author of the paper.

The spring-like robot can be customized into any shape and used as a sperm motility sensor, tweezer for cell manipulation and self-driven miniature machine.