Two Teenagers Watched Their Forests Burn – What They Invented Next Put Scientists Worldwide In Awe | World News

New Delhi: Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça were still at school when the hills near their home outside Lisbon, Portugal, went up in flames every year. These memories stayed with them. By the time they were 19, the pair had decided to build something that could reforest the charred hillsides that no man or machine could safely reach.

They developed Trovador, a compact, six-legged reforestation robot that walks like a spider and carries saplings across burned and unstable landscapes. The two students see it as a tool for many parts of Portugal, where fires have scarred deep mountain slopes.

Portugal has been living with this problem for decades. A 2024 study conducted by atmospheric scientist Carlos C. DaCamara of the University of Lisbon documented that more than 1.2 million acres (an area equal to 54 percent of the country’s territory) burned between 1980 and 2023. The year 2017, when 32,000 acres of tree cover was destroyed and wildfires caused three-quarters of this destruction, still stands out for the scale of loss. Many of these occur on steep slopes that are inaccessible to volunteers and fire crews.

Bernardino and Mendonça looked at these numbers and saw the same obstacle again and again: terrain. As they explain in their crowdfunding video, “Steep terrain prevents manual cultivation and heavy machinery from reaching many of the burning areas of Portugal.”

More than 60 percent of the country’s forests lie on rugged slopes, and traditional reforestation struggles to keep up with the constant cycle of fire and soil degradation.

Robot at a Glance

The duo assembled their first prototype in 2023, using recycled parts and with a budget of €15. Even this first version was able to plant saplings 28 percent faster than the human team, and the trees showed a 90 percent survival rate without needing post-planting care.

Smithsonian Magazine highlighted how this result convinced young people to take the concept even further and create a more robust version that could operate on inclinations of up to 45 degrees.

“We are building all-terrain robots that carry baby trees on their backs and plant them autonomously in difficult terrain,” Bernardino said.

Trovador’s six-legged mechanical chassis distributes its weight evenly, preventing soil compaction caused by tractors or other heavy machinery. This soft footprint is important because compacted soil loses oxygen and slows water movement; two things that young roots desperately need.

A depth-sensing camera guides the robot as it walks, helping it navigate around rocks, crevices and debris. Before planting, the built-in AI checks the pH and moisture of the soil. When conditions appear suitable, the robot performs a three-stage cycle of digging, placing and compacting. Field trials and existing research show that the method consistently provides 85-90 percent survival.

Drones have been promoted as another means of reforestation, although they disperse thousands of seeds simultaneously with little accuracy. Bernardino explained this limitation: “Drones… scatter seeds with low precision and waste one of the scarcest natural resources.”

Some pilot studies show survival rates of 0-20 percent. Trovador avoids this dispersal by planting established seedlings one at a time and selecting micro-spots where moisture or shade offer better opportunities.

The robot can place up to 200 saplings per hour and then upload GPS points, soil readings and battery levels to the cloud.

The duo is currently working on software that will help Trovador move away from dry areas and towards more promising land areas devoid of human signs.

Global Attention

His ideas spread quickly. Bernardino and Mendonça won a $10,000 grant by reaching the finals of National Geographic’s 2024 Slingshot Challenge. They later received a major European sustainability award for robotics. Environmental experts monitoring the project see strong potential but say the robot’s long-term performance still needs to be tested in more facilities.

Experts said the design “offers a practical framework for reforestation in areas that are insecure or difficult for humans to access,” while also noting that durability, navigation through dense vegetation and sustainable reliability need to be demonstrated before the robot can be widely adopted.

Cost still remains a matter of debate. Rather than selling the machines, the two creators plan to keep the robot affordable by offering Trovador as a service. The model they developed allows municipalities, insurers, forestry teams and NGOs to outline the burned area, select native species and get quotes for delivered saplings in one application. They describe it as “trees on the ground.”

Their estimate is that, once seed waste is factored in, this will be cheaper than manual crews and ultimately more economical than drone operations.

Following field trials in Lisbon this summer, the team is developing the minimum possible version for commercial use. Their goal is to have Trovador operating on large, damaged landscapes by 2026, a timeline defined by increasing urgency.

Bernardino’s goal is reforestation that is “fast, precise, easy to control, and ready to scale to the millions of hectares that climate models say we need to restore this decade.”