Robo Eggs Can Fool Even a Mother

Passive robots in the form of sedentary animals may be less flashy than a bird skin stretched over a robotic frame, but they can be just as good at keeping tabs on their environment—and significantly less nasty.

Take for instance the computerized eggs that the Calgary Zoo in Canada is using to try to bring back the critically endangered whooping crane. All whooping cranes alive today are the descendants* of only 16 cranes alive in the 1930s, says Tian Everest, conservation research program coordinator at the zoo. “Each whooping crane egg is incredibly valuable,” she says. “Whooping cranes exist today in large part because of the captive breeding program. And of all the stages of captive breeding, incubation is one of the least well understood.”

Everest and other biologists increase birth rates by taking eggs away from the nest as soon as the mother lays them. The mother, thinking that her egg has disappeared, will go on to produce as many as six eggs rather than just one. These abducted eggs are raised by hand in an aviary, and the birds will later learn to migrate by following an ultralight plane rather than their parents. Biologists noticed that eggs watched by their parents—or even by foster sandhill crane parents—hatched more successfully than eggs in the incubators.

“We’re using these [telemetric] eggs to teach us how cranes incubate their eggs, so we can mimic [the process] in the incubators,” Everest says. The telemetric eggs, sized and painted to look just like whooping crane eggs, continually measure their ambient temperature and humidity, record how often the parent turns the eggs, and use a light sensor to detect when the eggs are being sat upon.

The National Zoo uses similar telemetric eggs to infiltrate the nests of kori bustards and flamingos, while the St. Louis Zoo does the same with endangered waterfowl and Humboldt penguins.

Eggs aren’t the only robotic biomonitors sitting around. Brian Helmuth of the University of South Carolina uses thermometers tucked inside mussel shells to study how global warming affects coastal invertebrates. These robo-mussels pick up on how the animal’s shell interacts with sun, wind, and tide to determine its body temperature—a subtle point that a plain old thermometer would miss.

*Correction, September 12, 2007: The article originally confused "ancestors" with "descendants."

The New Doggy Treat: Poisonous Chemicals

Natalie Jeremijenko of New York University leads groups of students in creating robotic dogs to sniff out chemical pollutants. Each student chooses a commercially available dog robot, like HasBro's iDog or Sony’s defunct Aibo, and customizes it to detect certain toxic chemicals. Classes program their dogs to work in packs. When released on a site, the dogs communicate among themselves and compare signals. The dog with the strongest scent becomes the temporary leader of the pack until another dog picks up a stronger scent. This continues until the dogs locate the spot with the highest concentration of whatever toxic chemical they are sniffing out.

The virtue of the project is that it not only traces toxic substances, Jeremijenko says, but also gets people interested in toxic waste detection and cleanup. “The kids themselves have a lot of fun with the theatrics of the dogs,” she says. “The packs sit when they hit a certain level [of chemical contamination]. Or they’ll bark the national anthem. Or they’ll fall over and play dead.” The sight of the dogs sniffing out toxic levels of chemicals helps students understand and explain to their communities the distribution of toxic waste.

Jeremijenko has bred 10 packs of dogs in places as diverse as Arizona, Dublin, and the Bronx, New York. Currently she’s creating a curriculum that will help educators proliferate the chemical-tracking canines throughout classrooms worldwide.

Other researchers have placed similar robots, in the form of lobsters and lampreys, on the seafloor, and Jeremijenko hopes to have still more varieties hopping, slithering, and climbing their way into the environment soon.

Robots Don't Blink

Sometimes all a biologist needs is a pair of eyes watching the sky. Humans, imperfect lookouts that we are, are prone to distraction, especially when being drowned, baked by a hot southern sun, or bitten by poisonous snakes. Robots are resistant to these human frailties, which is why they’re perfect for scrutinizing the patch of Arkansas swamp where an ivory-billed woodpecker—a bird scientists thought had been extinct for decades—may have been spotted in 2005. “Robots don’t blink,” says Ken Goldberg, an engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.

After hearing of the ivory-billed woodpecker sighting in a notoriously inhospitable swamp, Goldberg contacted biologists at Cornell University and offered his help. He and Dezhen Song, a computer scientist at Texas A&M University, built an autonomous camera to keep an eye on the sky. A pair of cameras continuously records video of the swamp and can distinguish birds from airplanes, drifting leaves, and trees waving in the wind. They store images of birds and each month a researcher in a canoe paddles out to retrieve the data. Eventually, the cameras will be able to send them back to Song electronically.

The system hasn't found its quarry since it was set up last October. But ornithologists suspect that the woodpecker’s extreme skittishness has kept it under the radar for decades, so the robot may have a better chance than a relatively noisy and impatient scientist.

Goldberg and Song hope to soon set up cameras to record grizzly bears in Alaska, gorillas in Rwanda, and giant pandas in China.