From what I understand, trading robots (bots) are generally...

From what I understand, trading robots (bots) are generally employed by institutions.

These institutions don't pay a fee for each transaction (like "retail" investors have to pay to say CommSec for each transaction) - as they only pay a fee based on the aggregate of trades throughout the day.

So they can "set the bots" to either try & drive the share price down or up with heaps of very small trades - depending on the outcome that they want.

In small companies with not much volume of stock traded, it is a very successful strategy - albeit very frustrating to the retail shareholders (if the the bot is set to try & to drive the share price down).

Some of the institutions may be shorting the stock - or they can be working on behalf of shorters.

This is probably not the case with Pointerra's though - as only a very tiny % of 3DP shares are shorted (around 0.04%).