The last year has been tricky for electric vehicle startups. After a burst of investment mania in which companies raised billions on the mere promise of battery propulsion, valuations have come back down to earth. One of the loudest thuds has come from Arrival, the closest to what could be called a British electric vehicle champion. Its market value on the Nasdaq has fallen from $15bn (£11.6bn) in March 2021, when it first completed a merger with a listed cash shell, to about $1.75bn. Almost all its startup rivals have suffered similar plunges, but Arrival is arguably a special case.

The beauty of evolution is that it's so nonjudgmental. What began as the first organism billions of years ago has diversified into species that fly and hop and run, whatever best suits them in their environment. As Charles Darwin put it, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Look at the explosive field of robotics and you'll actually find the same thing going on. The classic humanoid of sci-fi has diversified into bots that crawl on six legs, or walk on two (however cautiously), or even bound around on a single limb.

A few years ago, SRI International introduced their MicroFactory platform, which uses hundreds of tiny robots (each one smaller than a dime) that cooperate to build macro-scale structures, like trusses, which can even contain integrated electronics. Such complex manufacturing requires cooperation between many different micro robots, each one outfitted to perform a specific task. Building a bunch of little custom bots is, we have to assume, a little bit tedious, so SRI has developed a tool shop for their MicroFactory that can make custom end-effectors for micro robots on-demand. SRI's micro robots are really just small magnets: all of the intelligence is built into the substrate that they travel on. Printed circuit boards drive them along electromagnetically, with the ability to control their speed and movement in two axes as well as rotationally.