Where a conventional person or vehicle can even have difficulty getting there, Marta Bernardino imagined sending a robot to plant new trees.
The idea arises from a very concrete problem: how to revive a forest in the areas devastated by fires when the soil is mountainous, steep and difficult to reach?
The young Portuguese began working on a solution in 2023.
Its first prototype was built with just 15 euros, using recycled materials. Then, along with Sebastião Mendonça, that initial project evolved to become Trovador: a four-legged autonomous robot specifically designed for reforestation.
The choice of the four legs is not only a futuristic idea.
Trovador is designed to move on rough terrain and face slopes up to 45 degrees, reaching places where the use of conventional machinery can become particularly complicated.
The Alpha prototype can transport 170 seedlings and uses sensors and navigation systems to move on the ground, recording also the location of the awning saplings through GPS.
The Beta version, planned for 2026, aims to increase the capacity to 200 seedlings and to reach a rhythm of about 200 saplings planted every hour.
And it is no longer just an idea developed on paper.
According to the official history of the project, the Alpha prototype reached about 1,000 trees planted during testing in Mafra, Portugal.
In 2024 the project also received one of the National Geographic Society's Slingshot Challenge Top Honors Awards, which rewards young people engaged in developing innovative solutions to address environmental issues.
The value of Trovador lies above all in the way it tries to solve one of the less visible problems of reforestation.
After a fire it is not enough to have new trees to plant. It is also necessary to be able to take them to the places they need, including those in which the slopes and conditions of the soil make manual work and the use of machinery particularly difficult.
And that's where Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça want to get Trovador.
A technology born not to replace a forest, but to help a forest reborn in the places where the fire erased it.