Portuguese students Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça have created Trovador, an autonomous tree-planting robot designed to save and restore burned land from deforestation by placing seedlings in steep terrain that humans and other reforestation methods cannot easily access. The young engineers developed two prototypes, starting with a spider-like robot with six legs in 2023, where the middle legs hold and plant trees while the back legs have rotating feet that press soil around planted seedlings. The upgraded full-scale version is shaped like a dog with legs that allow it to climb steep terrain, drills that make holes in the ground for seedlings, and embedded sensors that adapt to soil conditions in real time to adjust how each tree is planted.
The dog-shaped Trovador is believed to be capable of planting around 200 trees per hour on its own while following a smart pattern that allows it to plant different local species in a randomized sequence for optimal biodiversity. The duo’s findings reveal that since 2000, Portugal has lost more than 50 percent of its forest cover, and in 2024, global forest loss increased by 80 percent with wildfires causing most of this devastation. The students are currently running a campaign to help build the tree-planting robot, planning to deploy it first in Portugal and then later in other areas desperately needing reforestation. Through Trovador, Bernardino and Mendonça hope to combat the decreased biodiversity, worsened erosion, increased fire risk, and loss of forests that could absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, all through automated restoration of burned lands.
