Gennaro discusses the SlothBot, a solar-powered robot that slowly traverses wires, like its animal namesake, to monitor the environment. Gennaro Notomista is a robotics PhD student in the Georgia Robotics and InTelligent Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Gennaro studies control frameworks, with the goal of making robots robust against a changing environment so they can handle long-duration deployments. Toward this goal, he explores constraints-driven control and approaches to coverage control, or enabling robots to traverse closed environments. In addition to the SlothBot, Gennaro has applied his research to areas such as autonomous driving and swarm robotics.

The Atlanta Botanical Garden will be using a robotic sloth to save some of the world's most endangered species. The sloth robot, called Slothbot, hangs in trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment. It was built by the robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and uses solar panels to power itself. In larger environments, Salothbot will be able to switch between cables to cover more ground. "SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle," the Georgia Tech "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."

Most animal-inspired robots are designed to move quickly, but Georgia Tech's latest is just the opposite. Their newly developed SlothBot is built to study animals, plants and the overall environment below them by moving as little as possible. It inches along overhead cables only when necessary, charging itself with solar panels to monitor factors like carbon dioxide levels and weather for as long as possible -- possibly for years. It even crawls toward the sunlight to ensure it stays charged. The 3D-printed shell helps SlothBot blend in (at least in areas where sloths live) while sheltering its equipment from the rain.

Powered by a pair of photovoltaic panels and designed to linger in the forest canopy continuously for months, SlothBot moves only when it must to measure environmental changes -- such as weather and chemical factors in the environment -- that can be observed only with a long-term presence. The proof-of-concept hyper-efficient robot, described May 21 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal, may soon be hanging out among treetop cables in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. "In robotics, it seems we are always pushing for faster, more agile and more extreme robots," said Magnus Egerstedt, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal investigator for Slothbot. "But there are many applications where there is no need to be fast. You just have to be out there persistently over long periods of time, observing what's going on."