Robot-ants that can jump, communicate and work together

A team of EPFL researchers has developed tiny 10-gram robots that are inspired by ants: they can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves and complete complex tasks together. These reconfigurable robots are simple in structure, yet they can jump and crawl to explore uneven surfaces. Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies to complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators. At EPFL, robotics researchers in Professor Jamie Paik's Laboratory have reproduced this phenomenon, developing tiny robots that display minimal physical intelligence on an individual level but that are able to communicate and act collectively. Despite being simple in design and weighing only 10 grams, each robot has multiple locomotion modes to navigate any type of surface. Collectively, they can quickly detect and overcome obstacles and move objects much larger and heavier than themselves.