Swiss robots spy on crocodiles in Africa
Published: Thursday, Dec 7th 2023, 05:50
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Unnoticed by animals, robots from Switzerland have filmed crocodiles and lizards in Uganda. A new version of these robots has now been adapted for disaster control. The new robot was presented on Wednesday evening in the journal "Science Robotics".
"It's always exciting to build a new robot. But building one that comes so close to nature is even better," said Kamilo Melo in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. Melo founded KM-Robota in Lausanne, a company that develops robots.
Melo started building nature spies because of the British television channel BBC. In November 2015, the producers of the BBC documentary "Spy in the Wild" approached Melo, who was doing his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) at the time, to design crocodile and lizard-like surveillance robots. These were to be able to stay undetected by real animals on the Nile in Uganda in order to film the competition between the two species.
Studying movement for hours
To this end, Melo and his colleagues built a robotic system called Krock, which they covered with a skin that mimics lizard or crocodile skin. These two reptilian robots, named SpyCroc and SpyLizard, lived in the African wilderness and collected documentary footage in 2016 - eliminating the need for the presence of humans, who can interfere with natural animal interactions.
"It's a big challenge to make robots move the way animals do," explained Melo. He spent hours and hours watching film footage of how crocodiles move.
Another challenge was to make the robots fit for use in nature. "The robots have to be robust, durable and - which was particularly difficult to implement - waterproof," says the researcher. SpyCroc, the crocodile robot, can not only walk but also swim. According to Melo, this proved to be particularly useful for filming the Nile crocodiles during the breeding and rearing season.
For the search for missing persons
The knowledge gained in 2016 about the amphibious functionality of Krock prompted Melo and his colleagues to develop an improved system called Krock-2.
"One of our goals was to improve the robot so that it could be used for more than just entertainment purposes," said Melo. The result is a robot that, according to Melo, could be used in the future for disaster relief operations where it is too unsafe for human rescuers. For example, to search for missing people.
©Keystone/SDA
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