A group of EPFL researchers have developed a foldable device that can fit in a pocket and can transmit touch stimuli when used in a human-machine interface. When browsing an e-commerce site on your smartphone, or a music streaming service on your laptop, you can see pictures and hear sound snippets of what you are going to buy. But sometimes it would be great to touch it too – for example to feel the texture of a garment, or the stiffness of a material. The problem is that there are no miniaturized devices that can render touch sensations the way screens and loudspeakers render sight and sound, and that can easily be coupled to a computer or a mobile device. Researchers in Professor Jamie Paik's lab at EPFL have made a step towards creating just that – a foldable device that can fit in a pocket and can transmit touch stimuli when used in a human-machine interface.

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.