[brightcove video="2002644028001" /]
Nature-inspired drones are being developed all around the world. Now, researchers from Switzerland have built a robot inspired by sea turtles.
The sea turtle drone is called Naro-Tartaruga. (Tartaruga is "turtle" in Italian and Portuguese.) It's being developed and tested by researchers at ETH Zurich University with the goal of eventually developing a robot that can swim underwater autonomously. The researchers are also interested in studying fin propulsion and the energy consumption of fin-propelled systems.
The Naro-Tartaruga is the second nature-like drone that the researchers developed -- the first naro looks like a fish. The original naro was developed in 2008-09 by eight students of ETH, and the Tartaruga project started in 2010 as a semester thesis. The drone had its first swim in the summer of 2012, as part of a master's thesis.
The drone is around 39 inches long and weighs 175 pounds, it's mainly made of aluminum and it can dive as deep as 330 feet.
To learn more about this nature-inspired drone, watch the video above.