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The team's paper, "Magnetically Programmed Diffractive Robotics," published in Science.

The new diffractive robots are "going to blow that record out of the water," said Itai Cohen, professor of physics and co-author of the study.

Diffractive robotics connects, for the first time, untethered robots with imaging techniques that depend on visible light diffraction -- the bending of a light wave when it passes through an opening or around something.

To bypass this bottleneck, a few of us came up with the idea of revisiting an old technology called diffractive lenses.

Diffractive lenses, left, are much thinner compared to similarly powerful refractive lenses, right.