I watched several videos of SMT machines at work. Most of them use pre-loaded strips containing several dozen parts (surface mount resistors, caps, etc.). The fingers pick up a strip from the bin in front and load them into their magazine. The fingers can then place batches of parts where needed and solder them in place without having to go back to the bin and reload.
I can only imagine the complexity of the programming involved, like yourself the engineering involved.
If you're familiar with the type of pick-and-place that used fingers you'll be astounded by the current state of technology that uses a tiny vacuum (it looks almost like a medical needle at the end) to hold the part. Fingers are simply much too clumsy for the very small chip-scale packages and 0201 and 01005 sized passives.
I work at a PCBA fabricator (I'm in engineering rather than on the production side however), matter of fact. Our standard sized passive is 0402 (4 mil x 2 mil) and our machines are capable of high reliability with 0201 (2 mil x 1 mil). Our smallest IC capability is a flip chip with 0.50 mm pitch. Flip chip means the part is so small that there's no point to even putting it a plastic case, so the silicon die itself is literally built flipped with a metallized layer on top of the IC with terminals directly into the circuit. They then put "bumps" on the terminals, which are small balls of solder.
For example, this is a Freescale 32-bit 48MHz ARM Cortex M0 built in a 2mm x 1.5 mm chip-scale, and it even has a 12-bit ADC, 2 KB of RAM and 32 KB of flash on it. It's a fully featured MPU.
