eye dates back to at least the 17th century and also during the industrial revolution. In the 1950s, the first research into their use for guiding catheters with magnets mounted on the tip began. However, a commercially available system did not appear until 2003 with Stereotaxis’ Niobe robotic magnetic navigation system, which uses two moving permanent magnets to generate changing magnetic fields for guiding endocardial ablation catheters to treat cardiac arrhythmias (electrophysiology procedures). Although the market penetration of this magnetically guided catheter system has been slow, the past decade has seen increasing interest from researchers and medical device companies, and we see a linear increase in the number of papers published on the topic and an exponential increase in citations. Modeling multi-DOF electromagnetic navigation systems One important breakthrough in magnetic actuation from the past decade and the most highly cited paper in the field of magnetic actuation and microrobotics is (49). This work generalized the physics and mathematics of an arbitrary number of geometrically arranged electromagnetics to exert a magnetic force and torque on a given magnetic body. This led the way for the robotics community to bring more than 50 years of work in robotic manipulator control and design to bear onto the magnetic actuation problem. The patents that were generated from this work formed the basis for one company to develop a seven-electromagnet system that has been used to perform endocardial catheter ablations on several patients. Magnetically guided microrobots As discussed in the previous section, capsule robots are relatively large devices enabling larger permanent magnets to be mounted in them allowing for magnetic field gradients to provide appreciable actuation force (43). As free-swimming devices become less than a millimeter in size, the amount of magnetic material that can be affixed to them makes field-gradient approaches challenging, and new magnetic actuation strategies are required. Inspired by the helical motion of flagellated bacteria and the traveling wave motion of flagellated eukaryotes such as spermatozoa, the first microrobots appeared before 2010. Helical structures, in particular, are well suited to magnetic actuation because rotation fields generated torque, which scales well with fluidic drag torques. In the past decade, robust fabrication techniques and effective models have been developed that have created opportunities for developing microrobots capable of performing useful medical tasks (50). A number of efforts continue in this direction with new impetus on using materials that will eventually biodegrade in the body without harm to the patient or on developing magnetic tools for retrieving magnetic microrobots from the body after use. Magnetic locomotion strategies at millimeter scales If the constraints on magnetic material selection are relaxed such that toxic hard magnetic particles are incorporated into flexible polymeric structures, millimeter-scale robot designs can be created that exhibit a number of new and exciting locomotion strategies. Many of these techniques culminated in recent work from Sitti’s group (51) on a single device capable of multimodal locomotion enabled using a variety of dynamically varying magnetic fields. An impressive number of rolling, walking, jumping, and crawling motions were experimentally demonstrated in the paper. Magnetically guided catheters Current trends in magnetic actuation show a return to its roots in which magnetically tipped catheters and endoscopes are being increasingly investigated. The recent work of Zhao and co-workers (52) demonstrates the potential for magnetic actuation to be used to guide submillimeter hydrogel-covered catheters with embedded hard magnetic particles. This work identifies a number of medical procedures that could be performed with such devices in the future. Undoubtedly, the reason for this increasing interest is the promise for more maneuverable medical devices, at smaller scales, that can be manufactured more economically than complex pull-wire or motor-based devices. The past decade has seen a number of advances in magnetic actuation for medicine. We have gained a deeper understanding of how to generate dynamically varying magnetic fields and field gradients that can harmlessly penetrate the entire human body. We have seen an increase in the use of soft polymeric materials, following the trends we see in soft robotics, with the goal of creating safer, more maneuverable, magnetic medical devices (48, 49). Last, we have also seen many of these efforts move to in vivo trials and even into humans. Certainly, the next decade will see more efficacious medical therapies realized using this technology, resulting in the rapid acceleration of commercial efforts. Soft robotics for medicine Defining which achievement in robotics launched the field of soft robotics for medicine is not trivial. Robotics based on soft concepts, intrinsically compliant structures, and smart materials was strictly joined to biomimetics and bioinspiration from the beginning. On the other hand, the growing interest for bioinspired robots with compliant bodies has promoted the research on smart materials that could be adopted for fabricating soft robots or for providing soft robots with sensing