Foraging pangolins already dig in the dirt, so why not get them planting trees while they're at it? Well, training them would be pretty hard, which is

Pangolin-inspired robot poops tree seeds into holes it digs

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2024-10-07 11:00:06

Foraging pangolins already dig in the dirt, so why not get them planting trees while they're at it? Well, training them would be pretty hard, which is why a California high school student named Dorothy designed a pangolin-inspired robot to do the digging and planting.

Dubbed the Plantolin, the bio-inspired bot is the latest winner of the annual Natural Robotics Contest, which is run by the University of Surrey and funded by the British Ecological Society.

In a nutshell, the competition invites people from all over the world to submit their ideas for nature-inspired robots that are capable of doing something to help the planet. The winning concept gets made into an actual functioning prototype by one or more of the partnering research institutes.

In the case of the Plantolin, that partner was the University of Surrey itself. Other partners include Queen Mary University of London, the Royal College of Art, EPFL Lausanne (Switzerland), the Technical University of Munich, and Alexander Humboldt University (Germany). The previous winner was a robotic fish that filters microplastic particles out of the water.