In honor of my 1500th pageview, I post these nanobots I drew for fun half a year ago.

some of these nanites have optics in them and focusing structures to allow them to capture images while a group of static nanites somewhere safe, or perhaps a controlling computer, translates the images into navigational information. other nanites can peform tasks at the small scale of nanobots, such as building or repairing, and some of the nanites exist for storing parts of nanobots or perhaps samples of the world around them. There are even nanites with defense programming acting as antibodies in the swarm.

Although the swarm has many jobs at a near-atomic scale, they all must work together to act as an apparently solid surface (or spread out for portection) at the macroscopic scale.