((PKG))  SLOTHBOT  
((Banner:  In Praise of Slowness)) 
((Reporter:  Elizabeth Lee))
((Camera:  Carlos Andres Cuervo)) 
((Adapted by:  Zdenko Novacki)) 
((Map:  Atlanta, Georgia))   
((Main characters:  1 female; 1 male))  
((NATS))
((Prof. Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology)) 
The SlothBot is the world's slowest robot.  The deployment of the 
SlothBot at the Atlanta Botanical Garden is really just the first 
step.  Right now, it's primarily a proof of concept.  It's up 
there.  It's measuring things.  What we really would like to do is 
take it down to South America.  The Atlanta Botanical Garden 
have a program.  They're working down in Ecuador.  And the idea 
is really to bring this lost bot down there. 
((NATS)) 
((Emily Coffey, VP of Conservation, Atlanta Botanical 
Garden)) 
We’re just starting to get baseline data where we're starting to 
look at the temperature, the barometric pressure, the lights are 
PAR, the photosynthetically active radiation, which is the light 
available to trees and plants as well as carbon dioxide.  So, we're 
getting baseline data and that will help us then to develop and 
understand how best to, you know, put plants in particular 
environments and also what's going on in that canopy versus the 
ground level.  
((NATS)) 
((Prof. Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology)) 
I started reading up about sloths and got more and more 
convinced that slowness is a strategic advantage in some 
situations.  Not only do you become more energy efficient, but 
there are all sorts of other reasons why being slow is actually a 
good thing.  The whole idea came where I started to embrace 
slowness as a design paradigm in robotics. 
((NATS)) 
((Emily Coffey, VP of Conservation, Atlanta Botanical 
Garden)) 
You could put somebody in the canopy to understand what’s 
going up there.  And something that’s happening 50 feet above 
our heads in a really dense canopy, a really wonderful, you know, 
tropical forest similar to this, the tropical rotunda that we're in right 
now, is very hard and it's very time consuming and it's often very 
expensive.  And so, this will actually break down those barriers, 
allow us to get into places that we can't.  When we can't put a 
researcher in a forest for three to six months at a time, we could 
put the SlothBot there instead. 
((NATS)) 
((Prof. Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology)) 
From a conservation research and conservation biology point of 
view, what it's doing, it's collecting data that scientists like Emily 
Coffey and the other researchers here at the Atlanta Botanical 
Garden can use to make models of what's happening in various 
ecosystems. 
((NATS)) 
((Emily Coffey, VP of Conservation, Atlanta Botanical 
Garden)) 
The more data that we have to input into a system, an ecological 
model, let's say, the stronger that data can, the stronger that 
output of that model will be.  During the pandemic, we have seen 
that people who were sheltering-in-place, the moment they could 
get outside and they got to a park or they got to the Botanic 
Garden, they all of a sudden started to feel better and more 
healed and they started to actually realize that being around 
green spaces are critical for our human health and our human 
nature.  It is so good for our mental well-being. 
((NATS)) 
((Emily Coffey, VP of Conservation, Atlanta Botanical 
Garden)) 
I'm hoping that during these extremely challenging and really 
heartbreaking times, that we can all learn to appreciate nature a 
little bit more. 
((NATS))