Robot-ants that 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. The researchers have just published their work in Nature. Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies for achieving sophisticated tasks to survive their larger predators.