Environmentally friendly bio-inspired turtle robot

Inspired by the movement of a turtle in nature, a low-budget turtle-like robot was designed and developed to operate on natural terrain. Applying affordable additive manufacturing (3D printing) leads into creating unique 3-D structure with potential of flexibility, multi-functionality and multi-movement. By implementing solar panels, the energy from the sun is used, which makes the robot self-sustainable. The robot is controlled remotely with an android application designed for the need of this work. The bio-inspired robot can play an interesting role in real-life applications, such as monitoring in hardly accessible terrain, video and data collection for environmental friendly application, animals’ observation and others. The main application of the robot is for animal observation in the zoo, so it will often need to move across not even landscape in order to allow surveillance of that area. By implementing smart materials, the movement of the turtle can be improved. This paper presents the design concepts and functionality, together with CAD model of the robot, the prototyping (hardware, control and application design) and the results from the measurements.