Meet SlothBot!

Visitors to the Atlanta Botanical Garden could get a surprise when they look up in the trees. They might catch a glimpse of the adorable SlothBot! This robot was designed to look and move like a real-life tree-dwelling sloth—one of the slowest animals in the world.

What’s SlothBot doing up there creeping through the forest canopy? It’s observing. The treetop view allows the robot to gather data for scientists about the environment high above.

The cute robot was created by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle,” says roboticist Magnus Egerstedt. He came up with the idea for SlothBot and led the team that built it. “Being slow and energy efficient allows SlothBot to linger in the environment and observe things that scientists have a hard time gathering themselves,” he says. Egerstedt’s team used the following steps in the design process to build the bot.

Egerstedt wanted to design a robot that didn’t use a lot of energy and didn’t need to be recharged often. Inspiration struck when he visited a farm in Costa Rica, a country in Central America. He saw sloths slowly moving around in the treetops. He realized that sloth-like slowness could help robots use less energy. Egerstedt also thought that a sloth-like robot could help scientists who study forest life. Placing robots up in trees could greatly help scientists gather hard-to-reach data.

Egerstedt challenged his team to build a low-energy bot. It needed to be able to operate on its own in the wild. And it needed to be able to gather information about what was going on high up in the treetops.