Tarzan is lord of the jungle, but according to some fascinating work being done by a team at Georgia Institute of Technology, he may also be lord of our robotics labs — and perhaps our farms, too.
That’s because the team has developed Tarzan the Robot, a robot capable of traversing a high-wire in a manner not dissimilar to the way Edgar Rice Burroughs’ hero swings through the trees. The energy-efficient robot’s unusual form of locomotion was actually modeled on the movement of sloths, and is designed in such a way that it might one day be able to benefit from its high-flying position by being powered directly by the sun.
Unlike a lot of innovative robotics projects, however, the team behind this particular robot isn’t just developing it for open-ended research. Instead, the researchers have a very specific real-world use case for it.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/tarzan-the-robot-agriculture/
