Swiss robot spies on wild animals in Africa

A key challenge when building the robot was to make it move like a real crocodile. This also meant building one that could go in water. Keystone / Ali Haider

Unnoticed by animals, robots from Switzerland have been filming crocodiles and lizards in Uganda. A new version of these robots has now been adapted for use in disaster response. The new robot was presented on Wednesday evening in the journalExternal link 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 Keystone-SDA news agency. Melo founded KM-Robota in Lausanne, a company that develops robots.

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Melo started building nature spies because of the British television station 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.

Hours spent studying movement

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 humans to be present to observe natural animal interactions.

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“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 is to make the robots fit for use in the wild. “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.

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.

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