That depends on your perspective, particular since it says in the article "eventually, it'll be doing it inside your body". I believe it's intended for medical use.

Yep, once it's done it can just navigate to the nearest acetone reservoir in the body.

"Making the entire robot dissolve in water is a bit trickier, but the researchers seem confident that it’ll be possible in the near future."

But if it dissolves in water how is it supposed to make it anywhere inside your body? There's lots of water in there.

Contact lenses are ruined by contact with ordinary water but the saline solution and water in our eyes doesn't ruin them.

Same problem, there isn't really any pure water in your body to dissolve robots in either.

I downvoted your comment for the following reasons:

1. If you had read/comprehended the article you would understand how they plan to address this concern.

2. Really, even without reading the article, your comment just shows a failure of imagination. It's really not hard to see how this early prototype might be developed into more mature, useful applications.

Thank you for sharing your reasons for downvoting, but you're wrong. I did read the article, I do understand their plans and I didn't have a failure of imagination. It's cool tech, and I made a flippant joke in response to someone's comment.

Demoing that you can (partially) dissolve something in acetone or even water is not terribly impressive, even if their self-folding and mode of locomotion is pretty cool.

Ah I didn't really think of that - perhaps it was my own evil nature projecting onto the project!

More like you can distribute a 10,000 of them to clean up oil spill, toxic waste, kill mosquito larva, etc. and not worry too much about the environmental impact.

Except these are driven by external electro magnets.

It also strongly reminds me of DRM and planned obolescence.

If it dissolves into something harmless and possibly recyclable, then there is not much difference between it and nature - everything alive is built to decay and be used for something else.

But I agree that people seeking rent will be a problem. As usual.