National Geographic Robots Get Intimate With Lions

There is most definitely such a thing as getting way too close to lions. Way too close means close enough that lions can chase you down and tackle you and bite your legs off. Don't let this happen to you. Next time you find yourself in the Serengeti trying to snap the perfect lion picture, just do what the pros over at National Geographic do and enlist the assistance of a little tracked camera robot.

There's even better footage of the robot on the NatGeo website, although, be warned, when we say that some of these lion encounters are intimate, we mean intimate. Yeeeah. Slightly creepy robot, no?

This is not the first time humans use robots to spy on wild animals. We've seen robotic cameras used to film lions before (though not as close), as well as penguins, zebras, and bonobos.

Photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols talked to NatGeo about how he made all of this stuff work; we've reposted a few of the robotics-heavy answers below, and you can read the full interview here.

How did the micro-drone work out?

That's the nice thing about robots, though: you can crash them, or a lion can take a chunk out of one, and you can just buy a new one. It's a much better solution than an emergency airlift to the nearest hospital to try to find someone who can stitch your legs back on.

Via [ National Geographic ]



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Erico Guizzo
New York, N.Y.
Senior Writer
Evan Ackerman
Berkeley, Calif.
Jason Falconer
Angelica Lim
Tokyo, Japan

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