Fluffy Little Rovers Are an Effective, Adorable Way of Monitoring Penguins | Hacker News Reader

Fluffy Little Rovers Are an Effective, Adorable Way of Monitoring Penguins

spectrum.ieee.org

48 pointsspectruman9 comments

This is awesome but the pictures of the rover with the penguin chick on it got me wandering. Do animals, in this case penguins specifically, have their own version of the Uncanny Valley [0]? For an animal that does I'd imagine that this could actually have a measurable negative impact on their mood. Based on the information in the article it sounds like the penguins were OK with these rovers running around. But I wonder if they'd be even calmer if they looked just a tab bit more, or less, like another penguin to them.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I suspect that's true. The article mentions the birds even tried talking to one of the rovers ... I suspect the researchers want to ensure the rover appears (visually and behaviorally) harmless, but at the same time also doesn't appear to be something worth attacking.

I couldn't find a mention of this in the IEEE article, but a story on NPR on this topic this morning specifically mentioned that the penguins "sang to it and seemed disappointed that the rover wouldn't peep."[1] So, yes, it looks like the penguins did hit a level where they might have been (at least) confused about what was happening.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/361069792/scientists-find-snea...

Love the story! Interestingly, the fragment identifier has .hackernews in it... at first I thought that the poster was doing their analytics team a nice favor by adding it in, but turns out spectruman is either a bot or a media account for IEEE Spectrum (look at his post history). I know Reddit has rather strict policies for this type of account, not sure what HN's policies are. Either way, mods, please don't remove this story, or I'll just repost it as an interested third party and the comments will be lost :(

Wtf, the Penguin in the second photo has a wrist watch around his wing?

From the paragraph above the photo:

> The researchers went about this by sneaking up on a nesting penguin from behind, covering its eyes, and sticking a cardio-frequency monitor on its back and putting the receiver (a watch-like device) around its flipper.

Add that to the list of jobs no one told me about in grade 11 Careers class.

The PBS documentary series Nature has a really awesome episode about penguins using this technology. Really amazing footage.

Not sure if the episode is streamable anywhere, but here is the site: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/category/episodes/by-animal/p...

This is amazing! I would love to see the rover just operate autonomously, allowing the human to stay FAR away. It could seek out the tags and stamp the data while not bumping into penguins or generally not annoying them!

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