Cute chick rover: Scientists create a new way to spy on shy penguins

International scientists have created a remote control rover disguised as a chick to snuggle up to the notoriously-shy emperor penguins in Antarctica’s Adelie Land. The baby penguin robotic spy, the group’s fifth version, is covered in gray fur, sports black arms, and has a black-and-white painted face and black beak. It’s cute, and is so convincing that penguins essentially talk to it, as if it is a potential mate for their chicks. As researchers watched from more than 200 metres away, they saw that the penguins didn’t scamper away from it, even singing to it with “a very special song like a trumpet”.

They were very disappointed when there was no answer. Next time we will have a rover playing songs.

Yvon Le Maho, the University of Strasbourg scientist who led the team that built the rover

At other times, the rover crowded in with a group of chicks, acting as “a spy in the huddle,” Le Maho said. Scientists use rovers because researchers worry that just by coming close to some shy animals they change their behavior and can taint the results of their studies, Le Maho said. In the future, the researchers plan to use a more autonomous robot to spy on the emperor penguins. The idea is to use devices on the rover to read signals from radio tags on the birds.

Science penguin rover