Robotics: Swiss robots spy on crocodiles in Africa

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«Building a new robot is always exciting. But it is even better to build what is so close to nature,” Kamilo Melo said in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. Melo founded KM-Robota, a company that develops robots, in Lausanne.

Melo started creating nature spies thanks to the British television channel BBC. In November 2015, Melo, then a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, was approached by the producers of the BBC documentary “Spy in the Wild” to design crocodile- and lizard-like surveillance robots. To film the competition between the two species, they had to remain undetected by real animals in the Nile River in Uganda.

To do this, Melo and his colleagues built a robotic system called Krock that they covered with 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; thus eliminating the need for the presence of humans who could disrupt natural animal interactions.

“Getting robots to walk like animals is a big challenge,” Melo said. He watched hours of film footage showing how alligators move.

Another challenge is to make robots suitable for use in nature. “Robots need to be robust, durable and waterproof, which is particularly difficult to implement,” says the researcher. Because the crocodile robot SpyCroc can not only walk but also swim. According to Melo, this has proven particularly practical for filming Nile crocodiles during breeding and breeding season.

Insights into Krock’s amphibious functionality in 2016 led Melo and his colleagues to develop an advanced system called Krock-2.

“One of our goals was to improve the robot so that it could no longer be used just for entertainment purposes,” Melo said. The result is a robot that could be used in future disaster operations that are too unsafe for human rescuers, according to Melo. For example, to search for missing persons.

(SDA)

Source : Blick