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I know the line is blurry, but I disagree that clumps of iron oxide nanoparticles rise to the level of "robot"

This irritates me too, and I see it all the time. No, a sliver of metal or a piece of plastic being excited by an indiscriminate outside force is not a robot.

If there's offboard sensing and control systems which can maneuver the particles individually then you could make a case for it. If you're just jiggling them with a magnetic field then no.

The reason you're seeing it all the time is probably because roboticists are very excited about using external magnetic fields to create smaller designs that don't require carrying a power source, without worrying whether those are still "robots".

For example, the best paper award at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference this year was won by a magnetic jellyfish: http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss15/p13.pdf

Maybe the magnet should be counted as part of the robot, with the moving parts being analogous to a gripper.

Reminds me of the philosophical question: can rocks think?

https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456

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