Jonathan Rogers is a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. When it comes to a farm environment, he realized, many robots would face a number of problems. “They tend to get tangled. They tend to get stuck. It’s very hard to leave them out for long periods without a human assisting them.”
That’s when inspiration hit him: What if the robot could move above the crops? After all, he realized, “Sloths move from tree branch to tree branch to avoid having to walk around the forest floor.”
Inspired, his team set out to design a robot that could swing hand-to-hand along wires suspended above a field. He named their invention Tarzan, after the jungle-swinging character. Swinging is an energy-efficient motion. With that efficiency, a robot like Tarzan could work out in a field for months at a time, without needing to be recharged.
Sciencenewsforstudents.org quoted Rogers as saying that the next step is to test the robot in the field. “We really want to get this robot crawling around networks of cables.”