In the rainforest: a new robot must explore treetops

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For the test phase, the researchers manually attached the robot named Avocado by climbing the tree, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) announced on Tuesday. Later, a drone will serve as a kind of mothership, transporting the robot to inaccessible areas and anchoring it in the upper branches of the trees.

Once docked, Avocado can move up and down with the help of a winch. With two rotors, it can gain momentum to maneuver around branches or other obstacles. According to the SNF, this has already been achieved on an indoor course and a test on a real tree.

“We may find new animal or plant species”

However, the robot still needs to be optimized for use in the treetops of the rainforest, Steffen Kirchgeorg, the developer of the robot from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), emphasized in the statement: “In the treetops there are very difficult lighting conditions with a lot of change between light and dark. We are now trying to use the camera to achieve depth perception even under these conditions.”

Once fully developed, the robot will explore the forest canopy. Especially in tropical rainforests, a large part of life takes place in the dense canopy, according to the SNSF. “We may even find new animal or plant species,” says Kirchgeorg.

According to the SNSF, it has been extremely difficult to explore these habitats so far. Research teams that climb trees would only be able to collect data at specific points, and existing robots would also have difficulty with dense canopies. (SDA)

Source:Blick