Hidden in the canopy, behind the leaves, look closely you'll see eyes staring back at you.
躲在树荫下,在树叶后面,仔细看你会看到眼睛盯着你。
This is SlothBot, a robot inspired by the famously slow animal after a trip to Costa Rica.
这是SlothBot,它的一次哥斯达黎加之旅后引发的灵感,来源于动作很慢的一种动物。
I got mildly obsessed with sloths, these super slow animals were just sitting there, and I could not understand how these animals could exist.
我有点迷恋树懒,这些超慢的动物只是坐在那里,我不明白这些动物是怎么存在的。
Roboticist Magnus Egerstedt realized the sloths' slow movement makes them energy efficient and almost invisible to predators.
机器人学家马格努斯·埃格斯泰特意识到树懒的缓慢移动使它们更节能,而且几乎不被捕食者发现。
Always on the hunt to understand the natural world through robots,
一直在努力通过机器人了解自然世界,
he and his team at Georgia Institute of Technology decided to imitate nature and created the SlothBot.
他和他在乔治亚理工学院的团队决定模仿自然,创造出了SlothBot。
At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the solor-powered SlothBot is programmed to search for sunlight
在亚特兰大植物园,太阳能的SlothBot被设定为寻找阳光,
and collects data such as temperature and information on the light available to plants.
并收集诸如温度和植物可用光的信息等数据。
Unlike a stationary camera, the SlothBot can move over a large area to make observations.
与固定相机不同,SlothBot可以在大面积上移动进行观察。
This SlothBot can help with conservation and the effort to save endangered plant species, says Atlanta Botanical Garden's Emily Coffey.
亚特兰大植物园的艾米莉·科菲说,SlothBot可以帮助保护和拯救濒危植物物种。
One in every five plants are at risk of extinction. We have to really think creatively.
五分之一的植物面临灭绝的危险。我们必须真正创造性地思考。
To find out about mystery pollinators for rare orchids for example, researchers would have to spend hours or even days watching what pollinators come to a plant.
例如,为了找到稀有兰花的神秘传粉者,研究人员必须花上数小时甚至数天的时间观察传粉者接近植物。
We could put the SlothBot there instead. It can allow us to take away from that need of a human sitting there watching the flower for hours on end
我们可以把SlothBot放在那里。它可以让我们不再需要一个人坐在那里盯着花几个小时,
to actually allow us to be able instead to take video of that and then develop machine learning algorithms
而是我们可以进行录像,然后开发机器学习算法
to actually quickly analyze you know, weeks if not months of data.
然后快速进行分析,分析如果不是几个月,也是数周的数据。
Researchers hope to one day take the robot to the forests of Ecuador or even Costa Rica,
研究人员希望有一天能把机器人带到厄瓜多尔甚至哥斯达黎加的森林,
where this robot may come eye-to-eye with a real slow-moving sloth.
在那里,这个机器人可能会与一个真正缓慢移动的树懒相注视。
Elizabeth Lee, VOA news
伊丽莎白·李,VOA新闻