“Get over yourself and show us something worthy and we’ll pay attention.”

@stunmonkey: Funny, it seems like he’s already got plenty of your attention. If he didn’t then we wouldn’t have to listen to your whining.

This isn’t a serious research site, this is a hobbyist site. You talk like we’re discussing serious research here. If you were a serious researcher, you’d be working at an engineering company or as a researcher at a college and wouldn’t be trying to make this site into the serious research site you seem to want it to be.

You don’t even seem to understand the premise of “hacking”, it’s not the hyper-narrowly defined term you seem to want to force on everyone else. “Hacking” can be just as much about aesthetics as it is about functionality which flies in the face of your pissing in steam punk.

Face it, this isn’t “The Stunmonkey Page”, this is Hackaday. Like every publication that isn’t custom written for a target audience of one, you’re guaranteed to find articles on subjects you aren’t interested in. Most normal, well adjusted, people just ignore the articles that don’t interest them rather than whine, incessantly.

As for this article, I don’t know if I agree with it being called a bot, much less the smallest one in the world, but I do find it, at least, worthy of being posted here. Has similar work been done? Sure, but this also has the advantage of showing how it can be done by a hobbyist rather than the commercial/research efforts of the past. Personally, I’d refer to it more as a remote manipulator than as a bot but the term “bot” is pretty nebulous.

As soon as I saw the video I was thinking how useful something derived from this might be for placing smd parts on tinned pads. Sure, I could do the same thing with tweezers, but this is cuter and has potential to run autonomously.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/

First; This IS an idea and technique from the past.

Secondly; If you are openly inclusive of every idea without regard to merit or substance, it is just as limiting as tunnel vision. If you don’t parse crap than thats all you will eventually have – look at steampunk.

Third; Every third-rate hack and crank falls back on the old saw that everyone is simply too narrow-minded to see their greatness. Get over yourself and show us something worthy and we’ll pay attention.

Nothing is truly autonomous. Even you and I are dependent on outside machinery and energy sources for our mobility (i.e. the earth and sun).

Moving as much as possible outside of the robot is literally out of the box thinking.
Is an industrial robot that has cables that go to an external power supply and computer controller not a robot?

By using a magnetic controller robots can, for example, operate untethered inside the human digestive track.

These techniques of magnetic control may limit the range of a robot, but for microscopic cell manipulation or medical robots that move through a human body that is not a problem.
That is probably why there are scores of robotic researchers at dozens of universities experimenting with magnetically controlled robots of all shapes and sizes.

It is narrow minded thinking and tunnel vision that keeps art and science from advancing.

If you limit your self to the ideas and techniques of the past, you will severely limit everyone’s future.

Not every project can be insanely complex and advanced. We wouldn’t want them to be, even if they could.

This guy actually does make robots (ICs, motors, everything). Check his other Instructables contributions.

I think he just did this one to cater to the technologically disinclined.

Explain the humor? Please.

I think that’s a dime

also, not a bot