Скачать или смотреть Meet the SlothBot, the robot taking its sweet time to monitor our climate

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Now, robotics engineers at Georgia Tech have turned to an unlikely creature for their latest invention: the lazy, lovable sloth. Though the SlothBot, as its called, may not be as exciting to watch in action as a robotic cheetah or dog, there is purpose in its slowness. When it comes to monitoring the gradual but critically important changes happening to the global climate, it pays to sit back, relax and stick around for a while. Thats what the SlothBot is doing as we speak. Suspended by cables in the tree canopy high above the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the hyper-energy-efficient SlothBot is packed with sensors that are taking readings on everything from temperature, humidity, air quality and carbon dioxide levels. The idea for the SlothBot first came to Magnus Egerstedt, a robotics professor at Georgia Tech, while on vacation in Costa Rica, where he first encountered the notoriously lethargic animals. "I could not understand how these slow, tasty animals that are just sitting there waiting to be eaten by a jaguar could survive," Egerstedt said. "So I started reading about sloths and I got really excited about embracing slowness in robotics. And when youre measuring things that are evolving over weeks and months, you dont have to be fast -- its OK to be slow, as long as youre out there and getting the job done. "With this in mind, Egerstedt and several students in his lab came up with the idea to design a robot that could do just that -- reach places that humans and most high-powered robots cant, like a tree canopy, and stay there to monitor environmental changes over time. To do this, the SlothBot needed to be extremely energy efficient -- sloth-like, if you will -- to conserve power and continue sampling the air, without having to be lowered down from the trees and recharged. Suspended by cables, the SlothBot rarely moves, except when its battery runs low and it needs to crawl along the wires into the sun to recharge via its built-in solar