Georgia Tech’s SlothBot concept has been turned into a demonstrator, that will hang around in the canopy of Atlanta Botanical Garden monitoring temperature, weather, and carbon dioxide levels.

The concept was modelled on real sloths – animals that hang from branches and move slowly to conserve energy.

“SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle,” said GaTech engineer Profesor Magnus Egerstedt. “That’s not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and hyper-energy efficient will allow SlothBot to linger in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years.”

Power for the metre-long machine comes from solar panels, and it inches along a 30m wire between two trees. Programming moves SlothBot only when necessary, locating sunlight when its batteries need charging.

Sadly, it looks like the innovative mechanism that allowed the proof-of-concept SlothBot to move from wire to wire in the same way that a train changes tracks is gone for now, although the university said: “in larger environmental applications, it will be able to switch from cable to cable to cover more territory”.

Inspiration for the robot came from a visit Egerstedt made to Costa Rica where he saw two-toed sloths creeping along overhead wires in their search for food. “It turns out that they were strategically slow, which is what we need if we want to deploy robots for long periods of time,” he said.

Animal and plant conservation research is the nominal aim of the SlothBot project – the plan is to the robot to South America to observe orchid pollination or the endangered frogs after its time in the garden. Also, “SlothBot could have applications for precision agriculture”, said the university.

The project is supported by the US National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.