Kamilo Melo was building a robot shaped like a salamander for his Ph.D. in 2015 when an unexpected assignment came knocking on his door. Two producers at the BBC were keen to rope him in for a nature documentary. The brief was simple and complicated at the same time: build robots shaped like a crocodile and a monitor lizard that could be left along the Nile River in Uganda with the aim of filming the real-life species and capturing their interactions with one another. “It was one of the most challenging but, at the same time, the most fun things that I have done,” Melo, founder of KM-RoBoTa, a company that builds robots for scientific research and for industrial use, told Mongabay in a video interview. For Melo, working with biorobots in the field in Uganda was an eye-opening experience. In a study published recently in the journal Science Robotics, Melo and his team described their experiences and takeaways while working on the BBC’s Spy in the Wild documentary series, which premiered in 2017. Biorobotics combines biology and engineering to create robots that mimic biological systems. For instance, a biorobot built to look and move like a given animal, and equipped with a camera and audio recorder, can potentially document the animals behavior and interactions from up close. Since the beginning of his career, Melo had been building robots that have been used for scientific research and study. “I use animals as a source of information to make robots that…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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