Two Teenagers Built a Six-Legged AI Robot to Restore Forests — And They’re Not Waiting for the Future to Fix Itself

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Portugal’s wildfire crisis has created environmental devastation for decades, but the most hopeful solution emerging today isn’t coming from a government agency or a major research lab. It’s coming from two 19-year-old students, Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça, who decided that waiting for adults to fix the problem wasn’t an option. Their answer: Trovador, a six-legged, AI-powered reforestation robot designed to plant trees in places humans can’t safely reach.

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For these young inventors, the project began not with robotics ambitions, but with a sense of urgency and responsibility toward the forests they grew up around. Watching fire seasons worsen year after year, they realized that traditional reforestation methods simply couldn’t keep up with the scale of destruction. So, while most students their age were studying for exams, they were sketching out early designs for a robot that could help restore the landscapes they feared might disappear forever.

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Driven by the Question: If Not Us, Who?

Portugal has lost more than a million acres of forest to wildfires in recent decades. Many of the hardest-hit areas are steep slopes that human crews can’t reach and where heavy machines either get stuck or cause more damage. Bernardino and Mendonça were struck by a simple, haunting fact: more than 60% of the country’s forests are on slopes, the very places that are nearly impossible to replant after a burn.

 

To them, this wasn’t just an environmental statistic. It was a call to action.

They entered the project into student innovation competitions not for publicity, but to find collaborators, mentors, and small grants that could convert their sketches into functioning prototypes. From the beginning, they were clear about their motivation: technology should serve the planet, not just the marketplace.

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Building Trovador: Ingenuity on a Student Budget

The students’ first prototype wasn’t a polished machine built in a professional lab. It was rough and resourceful, constructed from recycled parts, 3D-printed joints, and whatever hardware they could afford. Yet even in this early stage, they proved something remarkable: a small team with limited resources could outperform traditional reforestation tools.

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Their robot, eventually named Trovador, walked on six legs like an insect. This wasn’t a stylistic choice; hexapods are naturally stable on uneven terrain. While a wheeled machine might tip over or slide, Trovador could climb slopes as steep as 45 degrees.

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The students built its intelligence layer by layer:

• A depth camera to map the ground and find safe paths.

• AI models to evaluate soil pH, humidity, and terrain quality.

• A planting mechanism that digs, places a sapling, and tamps the soil, all autonomously.

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These features weren’t just clever engineering; they were directly inspired by the problems the students saw during volunteer reforestation efforts. They had personally experienced the difficulty and danger of planting on burnt hillsides. They knew the bottlenecks. So they designed Trovador to solve them.

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What They Achieved — And Why It Matters

Despite being student-built, the early robot planted saplings 28% faster than human teams, and with a survival rate nearing 90%. It required no follow-up watering or maintenance and didn’t compact the soil the way large machinery does.

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Trovador could plant up to 200 saplings per hour, all while collecting data: soil readings, GPS logs, battery stats, that environmental teams could use for long-term monitoring.

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This wasn’t just a clever prototype. It was proof that two teenagers could rethink reforestation itself.

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Their innovation earned them recognition as finalists in the National Geographic Slingshot Challenge and a $10,000 grant, funding they immediately reinvested into building a more durable, fully autonomous version of the robot.

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Why These Students Stand Out

Bernardino and Mendonça didn’t simply build a robot. They reframed what youth-led climate action can look like.

• They approached a global environmental crisis with engineering, not despair.

• They created a real-world tool, not a concept model.

• They designed for the field, not the lab for slopes, dust, heat, debris, and unpredictable terrain.

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Their determination reflects a generation unwilling to watch ecosystems disappear without intervening. Instead of waiting for institutions to act, they chose to build a solution themselves.

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Looking Ahead: A Vision Larger Than a School Project

The teens don’t want to sell the robot as a gadget. They envision a service platform where cities, nonprofits, or land managers can outline an area on a map, select tree species, and receive a quote for “trees in the ground,” planted by autonomous robots.

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Their long-term goal? Deploy Trovador globally by 2026 and help restore “millions of hectares” of land that climate scientists identify as critical to reforest this decade.

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For two teenagers, it’s an audacious vision. But then again, so was building a six-legged AI forester and they’ve already done that.

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