Turtle tank

Dan Renzetti

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Dan Renzetti

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Meet ART, Yale’s amphibious robotic turtle, seen here in a tank on Yale’s West Campus. ART has a long to-do list: monitor ecosystems along shorelines, support divers, and provide researchers with a better understanding of how robotic devices can move in and between different environments. Engineering professor Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio says that a process dubbed “adaptive morphogenesis” allows ART to move comfortably on land and in water, with legs that morph into flippers and back again. The West Campus “tech tank,” managed by the engineering school as a facility for robotics testing, opened in May; it allows researchers to test ART’s movement between water and land in a controlled environment.