The wild world of robofauna and regenerative robots

Get your mind-blown emojis out, as Daniel Simons shares some of the leading robot technologies that are turbocharging a regenerative revolution.

In 2025, you might be forgiven for feeling like you’re living inside an episode of Black Mirror. Almost daily, we’re bombarded with a flood of AI news headlines that are, let’s say, both tantalising and discombobulating. ChatGPT can now pass law and medical exams, a 36-year-old mother from the Bronx has married a virtual husband, Google DeepMind can translate live meetings across multiple languages in real time, experts predict that AI agents and Large Language Models will make 40% to 100% of all human jobs obsolete within years.

But beneath the radical headlines there is another story taking place that we don’t often hear about. Even though it might not be as clickbaity as the leader of the free world posting AI-generated images of himself as the next pope—or as evil Sith Lord emperor—there is another quiet revolution taking place. It might not be front page news, but it could transform our relationship with the natural world forever.

We’ve spent centuries extracting from nature while pretending it was infinite, distant or irrelevant. That’s not going to cut it anymore. It’s thanks to that faulty code that we’re now faced with interlocking crises on multiple fronts.

We humans have known about climate change and the biodiversity crisis for decades. We’ve had warnings, models, roadmaps. But, despite our best efforts, we’re still accelerating down the same road. Even if we slammed on the brakes now and stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the lags built into the system mean the planet would keep warming, and ecosystems would keep unravelling.

With climate tipping points looming and ecological overshoot threatening to trigger social chaos, we’re now tasked with not only halting our destruction, but urgently reversing the damage we’ve already caused—while we still have time to act. It’s a challenge that more and more people are starting to feel is beyond us.

But what if the answer to the challenge does lie ‘beyond us,’ and what if the best thing we can actually do is ‘nothing’?

No, that doesn’t mean giving up. Imagine if we could take the same creative intelligence that gave us viral deep fakes of emotional companion kangaroos and channelled it into creating autonomous, intelligent machines that could actively heal the planet.

What if these machines were designed to mimic nature and could help replant forests, rebuild reefs, draw carbon from the sky, and revive dying ecosystems? What if they already are?

There is an epic new story playing out right now, one that’s less about the magic and chaos that’s erupting from giant AI server farms, and more about what’s taking place on actual farms.

The regenerative robot revolution might not be making headlines, but it’s on our doorstep, and it could hold the key to a human-friendly future.

Fire breathing robot dragons and forests from the sky
Intelligent machines are already being deployed to tackle our greatest challenges on an incredible scale. They’re mapping and repairing our oceans, monitoring at-risk species, and conducting search and rescue operations. We’re even starting to manipulate the weather with cloud-seeding autonomous drones. From soils to seas to skies, there seems to be a robot for every crisis.

Companies like AirSeed and Flash Forest are turbocharging efforts to rewild and reforest the planet. Hectares that would have taken humans years to plant can now be created in an instant. AirSeed’s drones can drop 250,000 seed pods per day. Flash Forest is on a mission to plant a billion trees by 2028. By leveraging autonomous flight, these ‘drone forests’ have the potential to rapidly restore degraded landscapes, boost biodiversity, prevent soil erosion and build stronger, more resilient ecosystems that can stand as a vital defence against climate impacts.

Mass planting on this scale offers tremendous hope for the future, but nothing rivals the value of keeping our mature, and irreplaceable, ecosystems intact.

After the devastating 2020 Bay Area wildfires in California, Dr. Waleed Haddad and Dr. Anukool Lakhina developed BurnBot, an autonomous, fire-breathing robot designed to safely conduct low-intensity controlled burns. Combining the best of Indigenous knowledge with cutting-edge technology, BurnBot mimics the ancient fire stewardship of Indigenous communities, but with a modern twist.

“Our autonomous units can operate day or night, in tight or remote locations, and apply consistent treatments with surgical precision,” explains Clint Neumann, director for the Australia region at BurnBot. “They reduce worker exposure to heat, smoke and physical risk while achieving a level of coverage and consistency that’s hard to match by hand.”

Neumann believes their breakthrough innovation holds transformative potential. “We see burnbot as a force multiplier for land managers, firefighters and restoration teams,” said Neumann.

“At full scale, BurnBot could help treat millions of acres annually—bringing down the risk of catastrophic wildfire, reducing emissions from uncontrolled burns, and creating safer conditions for communities, ecosystems, and fire crews alike.”

While forests face the threat of megafires, our oceans are facing challenges of their own. Rising temperatures, increasing acidity and mass bleaching events are pushing coral reefs to the brink of collapse.

In an effort to stem the tide, scientists have turned to land-based coral restoration—a method that offers greater control and cost savings compared to traditional ocean cultivation. The latest advances focus on cultivating baby corals through sexual reproduction, producing millions of genetically diverse offspring. But tracking the health of these tiny, 1mm baby corals demands painstaking monitoring, which quickly becomes too labour-intensive to scale.

To meet that demand, Dr. Dorian Tsai and his team at Queensland University of Technology have developed an AI-powered robot that monitors and counts baby tank-grown corals with remarkable precision. Their Coral Growout Robotic Assessment System (CGRAS) has already delivered a 14-fold increase in efficiency over manual methods, a leap that makes mass restoration not just possible but viable.

For Dr. Tsai, this isn’t just about cost or efficiency, it’s an existential race against time.
“Unlike traditional agriculture, which has benefited from centuries of innovation, we have just a few decades—less than 25 years—to develop the systems needed to mass-produce corals before climate change drives 90% of reefs to collapse,” Dr. Tsai says.

He believes the technology could become a lifeline for marine ecosystems.

“Ultimately, widespread adoption of this technology could provide a pathway to restoring damaged coral reefs on a global scale—helping preserve biodiversity, support marine life, and maintain healthy ocean ecosystems for future generations.”

Regenerative agriculture’s robotic revolution
One of the areas most deliciously ripe for change is regenerative agriculture. With food production accounting for up to one third of global greenhouse gas emissions and the UN warning that we may have as little as 60 years of topsoil left if current practices continue, it’s clear that our methods of growing food are not just unsustainable—they’re actively destroying the planet.

As the world begins to reckon with the ecological toll of industrial agriculture, regenerative farming is rising fast as a hopeful alternative. Rather than relying on monocultures, synthetic chemicals, deep tilling, and fossil-fueled machines, it draws strength from biodiversity, healthy soils and natural rhythms.

With tools like cover crops, composting, rotational planting and minimal disturbance, regenerative practices can heal landscapes, lock carbon in the ground, and build resilience in the face of climate change.

The problem is that even though regenerative agriculture is better for the planet and healthier for humans, it can be extremely labour intensive and knowledge-heavy. That’s where robots come in—not to replace farmers, but to help regeneration take root at scale.

Ground-based robots can pull weeds without a drop of herbicide. Drones can map crop health and soil conditions in real time, and AI tools can analyse data to fine-tune planting cycles or flag pest outbreaks before they even start. Together, these technologies unlock the potential for farming in harmony with nature, not in opposition to it, and pave the way for planet-friendly farming to become the new global norm.

Even fast food is waking up to the promise of this new philosophy. Chipotle, better known for burritos than biodiversity, has launched a $50 million fund to accelerate the scaling up of regenerative agriculture. One of the first investments from their ‘Cultivate Next’ fund was in Greenfield Robotics, a Kansas-based startup founded by third-generation farmer Clint Brauer. His lightweight, electric robots work around the clock, planting cover crops, eliminating weeds, and building soil health without chemicals or heavy machinery. They’re already rolling through farms across the United States.

Pixelfarming’s Robot One is another leader in the regenerative field. With ten arms and cutting edge computer vision, the solar-powered machine is capable of making over 100,000 decisions an hour. It can tell the difference between a weed and a wildflower, choose what to remove and what to plant, and even recommend companion plants to restore soil health.

Lero from Nature Robotics has three interchangeable implements which enable it to work autonomously on weeding, monitoring, and seed planting. Using advanced technologies like AI-driven modular autonomy software and mesh navigation, Lero also creates 3D maps of crops and weeds, giving farmers, agronomists, and plant breeders detailed insights. With these combined tools, the smart machine could unlock radical productivity across vegetable fields, orchards, agroforestry and agro-photovoltaics.

Morphological computation, squishy skeletons and necrobotics
While coral-planting drones and fire-fighting bots have begun tending to damaged ecosystems, the next frontier of regenerative robots won’t just work in nature, they’ll work like nature.

Sam Tidswell leads European investments at ReGen Ventures, a Byron Bay venture firm that’s on a mission to find and support regenerative technologies that drive planetary-scale transformations. Boasting an impressive community of investors and advisors including Rich Roll, Seth Godin, and former Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario, ReGen Ventures is aiming to channel one billion dollars towards regenerative projects over the next decade.

The firm has already backed a spate of incredible world-changing technologies like synthetic biology, ocean-based carbon drawdown, vegan leathers and mycelium-based forest regeneration, but what has Tidswell buzzing at the moment is a paradigm shift that is taking place in the robot world, and the implications that has for planetary stewardship.

“Robotics is at a structural inflection point,” says Tidswell, “not just because of AI, but because of how we build the bodies of the robots themselves.”

Traditional robotics, he explains, relies on a ‘genesis paradigm’ where robot bodies are designed first and intelligence is added later through software. The new paradigm, inspired by nature, integrates intelligence directly into the robot’s physical form.

This concept, known as morphological computation, means that the robot’s structure, materials, and movements contribute to its decision-making processes. It’s the way biology has operated for billions of years, with bodies and control systems working in symphony.

“Octopuses coordinate eight fully soft limbs with a decentralised nervous system. Insects flap their wings at resonant frequencies using asynchronous muscles—they adapt to load mid-flight using passive mechanics. Snakes propagate body waves to slither across uneven terrain without needing a map. A mountain goat’s hoof has been shown to exhibit passive mechanical intelligence—the shape alone helps prevent slippage without needing neural feedback,” said Tidswell

Morphological computation takes direct inspiration from these biological marvels, and enables the creation of machines with faster response times than centralised control, lower energy consumption and increased ruggedness.

“The body filters signals, stores energy and adapts in real time. If part of it breaks, the system often still works. It’s a resilient, distributed design,” said Tidswell.

Bio-inspired robots that embrace natural intelligence are already having a real world impact.

Teams at ETH in Zurich have created ‘RoBoa’, a serpentine robot designed for disaster response that flexes through pipes, sewers, and collapsed buildings and can safely navigate explosive environments. The pneumatic snake extends up to 100 metres into areas too dangerous for human rescuers and is equipped with speakers and microphones to communicate directly with trapped victims.

German researchers from the Max Planck Institute are experimenting with jellyfish-inspired machines that glide through oceans with bio-mimetic grace, removing plastic pollution while moving so naturally through the water that they leave marine ecosystems completely undisturbed.

Researchers from EPFL’s CREATE Lab have created GOAT, a shape-shifting robot that, as its name signifies, is ‘Good Over All Terrains’. Inspired by mountain goats and armadillos, GOAT can spontaneously morph between a flat rover shape and a sphere, allowing it to drive across flat terrains, roll down hills and even swim through rivers and streams. With only GPS and orientation sensors—no cameras or complex equipment needed—the breakthrough invention adapts to harsh and unpredictable terrain through physical interaction rather than computation, which makes it an incredibly promising innovation for environmental monitoring, disaster response and even extraterrestrial exploration.

These nature-inspired robots can navigate terrains at unprecedented speeds and operate in environments too dangerous for humans. But to reach their full potential, bio-robots will need to be agile, damage resistant, and manufactured without reliance on finite or environmentally destructive materials. That’s why researchers around the world are racing to invent ‘soft’ and ‘squishy’ robot bodies that better mirror the versatility and adaptability of living organisms.

In 2017, Harvard researchers revolutionised soft robotics using nothing more than plastic drinking straws. Inspired by the agility of spiders and insects, they created semi-soft machines ranging from simple one-legged crawlers to complex eight-legged “arthrobots.” By cutting notches into polypropylene straws and inserting inflatable tubing, they built joints that could extend and retract like arthropod limbs. The technique enabled them to create robots that could walk like ants and push themselves across liquid surfaces.

At Penn State University, researchers are developing robots that can heal themselves. Using biomimetic polymers that mimic squid proteins, they’ve created robots capable of self-repair, biodegradation, and recycling into manufacturable powder. Their magnetic soft robots could eventually crawl through earthquake rubble to find trapped victims or even travel inside the human body to deliver medicine.

Literally ‘borrowing from nature’, engineers at Rice University have turned dead spiders into tiny mechanical grippers. By injecting air into the spiders’ prosoma chamber, which powers their natural hydraulic system, they can trigger the legs to extend and contract on command. This eerie but ingenious technique has given rise to a new class of tools, which the project’s researchers dub ‘necrobotics’. The team’s bio-inspired devices can lift more than their own body weight while blending seamlessly into natural environments, making them a unique, biodegradable solution for delicate operations like capturing elusive insects without creating lasting environmental waste.

From lab to life
The fusion of intelligent machines with natural intelligence and indigenous knowledge could spawn a new geological era for humanity.

We’re already catching a glimpse of what bio-inspired machines can do in our fields, forests and seas. With pollinating robobees, soil cultivating machine-worms, gnat inspired robots the size of water drops—and virtually every insect or animal-inspired AI imaginable being developed—it’s hard to fathom what might be possible once these innovations make the leap from the lab into the living world.

The future might look less like dystopian science fiction and more like a thriving ecosystem where billions of autonomous robo-beings act as a planetary immune system, reducing our burden on the earth, eliminating threats before they occur, and repairing damage in real time.

It might not be making newspaper headlines today, but if we get it right, the regenerative robot revolution could prove to be as transformative as the invention of the printing press itself.