This year brought us some pretty awful wildfires.
Some communities that saw fire in January are still cleaning up here in December.
A project in Portugal asks: what if robots could take on some of the post-wildfire work for us?
This robot’s name: Trovador.
Its mission: planting trees.
Deforestation is an broader issue well beyond wildfires, but it’s a related one: an area that loses its trees in a burn can risk soil erosion without new trees to take the old ones’ places.
And as anyone who’s ever tried to help out on Arbor Day knows, planting a tree takes some time, attention and care; you can’t just plop a seedling on a spot and walk away.
It takes work, even on relatively flat ground but especially in areas where there are hills, or cliffs, or slopes which make it hard for humans to even reach.
That’s where Trovador comes in: the idea is that the robot can plant baby trees when time is of the essence but human resources are scarce.
The inventors say their prototypes have been able to handle somewhere around 200 trees an hour.
Its internal sensors can drill holes in the ground for the seedlings, and its internal sensors can adjust the depth of those holes based on the soil conditions.
The robot can also pat down the nearby soil, and it can plant a variety of trees to give a forest more biodiversity.
The inventors just raised a new round of funding on Indiegogo over the summer, which might put us closer to getting a forest’s worth of robots out there working on the planet’s behalf.
And, hopefully, it keeps our story from serving as the prequel to WALL-E.
For a while now, we’ve had goat yoga, puppy yoga, kitten yoga, even yoga with elephants.
Now, a farm in Shelby, Ohio is offering yoga classes with its otters.
The proprietors point out that otters are very sociable, good for hangouts.
But they are also notorious for stealing stuff, so there’s a rule: no items in your pockets during otter yoga class.
I probably otter try that class out sometime.
tree-planting robot saves burned land from deforestation by putting seedlings in the ground (designboom)
An ‘otterly’ good time: Ohio farm offers ‘world’s only’ yoga class where otters set the vibe (10TV)
Our show is 100 percent human-powered, thanks to our backers on Patreon
