I was excited for this new step towards a gray goo apocalypse until I saw this part of the article:
"Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have the ability to develop into different cell types. To make the xenobots, the researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and left them to incubate. There's no manipulation of genes involved.
"Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study.
"In that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell.""