The Robotic Baby Penguin That Spies For Scientists
The following is an excerpt from NPR’s “All Tech Considered,” by Priska Neely
Many penguins tracked in Antarctica have data-collecting devices underneath their skin. Usually, researchers have to get close to them and use hand readers to pick up a signal from the devices — which freaks the penguins out.
Yvon Le Maho, who has been studying penguins for more than 40 years, decided to tackle that problem.
“I thought maybe we can use rovers,” Le Maho says.
He got the idea to use a remote-controlled, wheeled device disguised as a penguin to infiltrate the colony about seven years ago. Turns out, it works. Le Maho and other scientists at the University of Strasbourg in France published a paper about their work with rovers in the journal Nature Methods last Sunday.
Le Maho and his team equipped some penguins with heart monitors and saw that when the rovers approached instead of humans, stress levels stayed low.
After a few model tweaks, they made a fluffy baby penguin that they call a “chick cam.”…With this special access, the chick cam got a shot of an emperor penguin laying an egg — a moment that hadn’t been captured before.
To read the full article and watch a clip of the “penguin cam” in action, click over to NPR.