Swiss robot spies on wild animals in Africa

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 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 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 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. ...