Its weight consists of almost 90% water, this minuscule, centimeter-sized 'bot comes alive without the need for intricate hardware, hydraulics, or electrical current. Strangely, the source of its amazing animation is light and its attraction to an external rotating magnetic field according to a paper published Dec. 9 in the online journal Science Robotics. Video of Sea creature-inspired robot walks, rolls, transports cargo "Conventional robots are typically heavy machines with lots of hardware and electronics that are unable to interact safely with soft structures, including humans," explained Samuel I. Stupp, study co-author and director of the Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science, a Northwestern-based Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. "We have designed soft materials with molecular intelligence to enable them to behave like robots of any size and perform useful functions in tiny spaces, underwater or underground."