I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a robot or relate to magnetic philosophy or science. In medieval and early modern Christianity, the lobster is a symbol of resurrection. Pliny the Elder observes that the lobster molts every year--sheds its shell and acquires a new one. In Christianity, this symbolizes resurrection, especially of Jesus.

This particular image is very clearly Eucharistic, hence the chalice. You see lobsters and grapes--another Eucharistic symbol--with some frequency in early modern Low Countries art. If the image features a decapitated (?) lobster bleeding, it is instructional. The lobster's blood is the blood of Jesus is the consecrated Communion wine.

On the other hand, if the lobster is not bleeding but actually vomiting, the image is satirical: the lobster came to satirize the Jesuits by the later early modern period. The image would then mean that the Jesuits desecrate Communion wine somehow, probably by being Jesuits. They were not always so popular in early modern times.

Being unable to tell the difference is why I am not an art historian.

Do you have a source for the image?

WAIT! I think I was wrong before. I mean, I'm right about the lobster being a symbol of resurrection, and I still think the impact of that particular image is Eucharistic because of the chalice (unless that's just what cups looked like then?), but I tracked down the fascination with--yes--vomiting lobster. It's not that the lobster itself is a robot; it's that the lobster is acting like a basic machine: a siphon.

A cooked lobster, laid with its tail in a vat of liquid but the majority of the lobster hanging over the side, will siphon up the liquid through capillary action and "vomit" it into a second dish--the lobster acts as a straw or siphon. Here you can see the lobster, symbolizing the resurrection next to Eucharistic symbols (the grapes), but positioned to act like a siphon as well.

Are you perhaps at Princeton? Because based on what you said, your professor's lecture tracked very closely with this lecture (ETA: PDF warning) Anthony Grafton (of Princeton) presented in 2002.

After a lot of looking, I found the source of the image you linked. It is from this illustration in Gaspar Schott's work Mechanica Hydro-Pneumatica" (1657). Gaspar Schott was a Jesuit priest and scientist in the mid-17th century. Most of his published research, from what I understand, is reporting the experiments of others, as he did not conduct many experiments of his own. He is most famous for his work on hydraulic and mechanical instruments, and in fact this illustration is from page 180 of a work specifically on hydro-pneumatics.

If you can read Latin (which I can't, I just used Google Translate to try to get an idea of what it was about), page 185 of the aforesaid Mechanica Hydro-Pneumatica has the description to go along with the illustration. It appears that Schott is describing the capillary action of a cooked lobster acting as a siphon, just as /u/sunagainstgold has already described. It appears to be a scientific observation of the phenomena, as my horrible Google Translate Latin seems to indicate. It's basically a description of what happens, and an observation that it appears to be a natural siphon of some kind, and compares it to the same cappilary action that one sees in dipping cloth into liquid and the liquid seems to climb the cloth.

I just wanted to add to the discussion that I found the original source and it appears to be scientific in nature, as opposed to the religious iconography about the Eucharist and symbols of resurrection. I would argue that it's not even really robotic (although Athanasius Kircher is supposed to have come up with some sort of robotic lobster, according to some blogs I ran across, but this image is the only one I found related to him, and it isn't even written by him).