A 'Lazy Sloth' Robot Hanging on Forest Trees is Quietly Protecting Our Planet: 'Slow is Better'
High above the Canopy Walk, inside the fertile hardwood forests teeming with tulip poplars and Southern silverbells, is a sloth just hanging around. Take a stroll down the Storza Woods in Atlanta Botanical Garden, and you’ll see him, looking at you from above, with his googly eyes, smiley face, and a body 3D-printed in grey electronic metal. All day, he dangles from the treetop branches, bathing in sunshine that recharges the solar panels studded in his belly. But don’t let his cute smile and stationary posture fool you into thinking that he’s lazy.
With zillions of tiny cameras, sensors, motors, gears, batteries, and computers peppered in his body, he works as the private investigator for the garden, spying on everything from the health of plants to love affairs between birds and flowers, to whether the bees are dipping their tiny feet in rivers to collect oils. You may think that he’s too slow, but if you could catch a glimpse of the data contained in his memory chips, you’d realize that being lazy can actually be a superpower. It’s a detective story, and he’s the hero. His name: “Slothbot.”
Who is Slothbot and what does he do?
Slothbot is unlike any other robot out there. Cuter than the real-life sloths and more powerful than any of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Slothbot is a brainchild of the engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Teams of biologists, engineers, and conservationists came together to build something inspired by the lazy lifestyles of sloths, marrying it with the technologies of modern robotics.
It’s a “Hyper energy-efficient robot that lives amongst the trees and helps us do things like environmental monitoring and conservation work by just being present amongst the trees, measuring interesting things in the world around it,” explained Magnus Egerstedt in a video by Georgia Institute of Technology, who’s also the lead creator behind Slothbot. About three feet long, the robot slides along a steel cable strung between two large trees as it monitors and detects triggers in temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, pollinator population, and other details of things unfolding down in the forest.
Courtesy of a family vacation
The idea of Slothbot first materialized when Egerstedt was enjoying a family vacation in Costa Rica. While watching the sluggish animals hanging upside down from trees and occasionally descending to the ground for food, he was obsessed. “When I got mildly obsessed with sloths because I couldn’t understand how these creatures could exist,” he recalled, “They’re just tasty pieces of meat sitting up in the trees, waiting to be eaten by eagles or jaguars, but turns out they are strategically slow on purpose.”
Fascinated by their lethargy, Egerstedt decided to build something that could illustrate that “being slow is actually better.” Soon, sheaves of papers that were inked with bizarre sketches of grinning bots and creepy gadgets heaped his desk. During 2020, when he conceived this idea, wheeled robots were already a common sight. But since he was thinking about developing a robot for the natural setting, this kind of robot would be easily defeated by obstacles like rock and mud, he wondered.
Flying robots weren’t feasible either. They consumed a lot of energy to last longer, which is where Egerstedt got the idea of a wire-crawling robot. “It’s really fascinating to think about robots becoming part of the environment, a member of an ecosystem,” he said in a university press release. “While we’re not building an anatomical replica of the living sloth, we believe our robot can be integrated to be part of the ecosystem it’s observing, like a real sloth.”
Collaboration with Atlanta Botanical Garden
By collaborating with Atlanta Botanical Garden, Egerstedt and his team not only got access to a fabulous nature facility but also came across a real set of dedicated conservation biologists who validated his idea with the reassurance that what he was doing was “actually relevant.” Fast forward to today, he believes that the robot isn’t just a brilliant private detective, but also an inspiring personality that will trigger curiosity among kids, so the coming generations will be interested in utilizing robotics to love nature and make the world a better place.