Data-gathering Tumbleweed robot seeks to understand desertification
(Phys.org) —Jerusalem based industrial designer Shlomi Mir knows a few things about the desert. He also is aware of desertification as a global problem. He has been working on a tool, the Tumbleweed, to help researchers both understand and explore solutions to hold back the spreading desert. Mir's Tumbleweed concept is a robot that can roll across the desert, gathering information. As Wired explained, in its current prototype form Tumbleweed gathers that data for transmission. On Mir's website, an illustration shows an Arduino, Android-based core for GPS communication and data collection. The illustration also shows a kinetic generator for power. "Desertification is a serious and irreversible state of land degradation, particularly evident in drylands," said Mir.