The proto-concept of Robat has been with me since '98. Unfortunately most of my doodle art of those days took place in my notebooks for school in my then undesired subjects. And as such I disposed of nearly all my notebooks from those subjects except for those of the last three years of school. But nothing of significance has been lost from that era as far as I am concerned.

The colour scheme was definite in early 2002. In 2001 I was at first thinking of giving it a blue body with black eyes. As for the plating I was still debating between a bronze/copper orange and the current silver.
And approximately until 2002 I viewed Robat rather as an exosuit than an own species. This exo-suit was connected to its user by an MMI and the user would have to exert strong mental discipline as the suit was self-aware enough to attempt to take over its bearer the first chance it gets.
Roughly by the time the wings appeared I abandoned the exo-suit idea and went along with the dust-creature concept.
With the wings I wasn't sure whether I would want them to be materialised as a "mirage" or real structure formed from the dust-material. Currently the wings are a removable levitation contraption I would like to call a graviton confuser. Each of the wings' fingers "suggests" for the gravitons a different gravitation center to float to, eventually "confusing" the gravitons in the area of effect enough to "ignore" the real gravitation center that should affect their flow usually. At this point I would like to thank my utter ignorance of theoretical physics for the successful development of this fictional contraption.