A sci-fi adventure film from the 1960s, Fantastic Voyage, features a group of doctors shrinking into microscopic size and venturing into a patient’s brain to repair damages. A CUHK research team has recently brought this surreal fantasy to life by developing biohybrid soft microrobots, which navigates in tiny lumens for health inspections and medical treatments.

There is a new way to deploy the right microrobotic swarm into a bodily fluid to fight illness. A research group of the Faculty of Engineering has categorised magnetic swarming microrobots and devised ways to select the one that navigates best in a bio-fluid, taking treatment into the vascular system and other confined regions of the body.