An interesting little story about a robot penguin chick appeared on the I F***ing Love Science website a few days ago.
French researchers wanted to monitor penguin colonies in Antarctica, the problem traditionally has been that lumbering humans tend to distrupt the birds’ colonies. To overcome the problem the researchers designed a very basic dummy penguin chick which they could drive into the colonies.
It worked very well with both the young birds and adults accepting the robot into their community which gave researchers great insights into the birds’ social structures.
While it’s a cute example, the robot penguin shows just how many applications we’re going to see in the next few years for intelligent devices that can go into places that would be inaccessible for humans. For many industries this is going to dramtically change the way they work.
Image courtesy of Alex Bruder through Free Images.