Unless these bots were made out of a material that was ready available on almost any planet: ice. That’s the idea behind IceBot, a very preliminary attempt at building robots with frozen water. The people behind IceBot, Devin Carroll and Mark Yim from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, stressed in a recent paper on the idea that there is a long, long way to go still. However, their prototype, which is more like a robot made of some traditional metallic parts and some ice parts, was able to navigate at room temperature without breaking or melting, which is a significant start.
The goal is to eventually build a robot made mostly (if not almost entirely) of ice that is capable of “self-reconfiguration, self-replication and self-repair” so long as it is in an environment where ice is readily available.
