Teen-built spider robot aims to regrow Portugal’s burned forests

Two 19-year-old Portuguese students, Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça, have developed Trovador, an AI-enabled six-legged robot designed to autonomously plant trees in wildfire-damaged areas of Portugal that are too steep or hazardous for humans and heavy machinery. Portugal, severely affected by wildfires—with over 1.2 million acres burned between 1980 and 2023—has more than 60% of its forests on difficult slopes, making conventional reforestation challenging. Trovador’s hexapod design evenly distributes weight to avoid soil compaction, uses a depth camera to navigate obstacles, and analyzes soil conditions before planting saplings individually, achieving an 85-90% survival rate in trials. This targeted approach contrasts with drone seeding, which often wastes seeds and achieves low survival rates. The robot can plant up to 200 saplings per hour and uploads data such as GPS coordinates and soil metrics to the cloud for remote monitoring, with future updates planned to optimize