Teenagers Saw Portugal’s Forests Burn. So They Built a Six-Legged Robot to Replant Them.
After years of watching summers turn into firestorms, two students designed an autonomous hexapod built to survive the ashes—and seed the next forest.
Portugal’s wildfire seasons have gotten so violent they feel less like “natural disasters” and more like annual apocalypses. Hills torch in minutes, eucalyptus goes up like soaked rags, and rural towns spend their summers staring at the horizon, waiting for the next orange glow. For most kids growing up outside Lisbon, that’s just background noise. For Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça, both 19, it became a design brief.
The two engineering students watched the fires crawl dangerously close to their homes year after year. Instead of joining the usual Portuguese cycle of mourning → outrage → political shrugs → replanting by volunteers with shovels, they went full sci-fi. Their answer is Trovador: a six-legged, AI-guided, all-terrain robot built to wander the charred skeletons of Portugal’s forests and quietly plant them back to life.
Trovador looks like something between a Mars rover and a robotic spider: laser-cut joints, insectoid balance, a white body carrying biodegradable seed capsules like a tiny post-apocalyptic gardener. “We wanted something that could go where people can’t,” Bernardino says. After a fire, the terrain is more than hostile — it’s unstable, slippery, toxic. Clearing crews call certain slopes “death corridors.” Trovador just calls them Tuesday.
The robot uses hexapod locomotion, reading the ground with sensors before drilling a small hole, dropping a seedling pod, and covering it with soil. It moves slowly, deliberately, like a mechanical ant on a mission. And unlike volunteers who burn out after six hours, Trovador doesn’t need water breaks, sunscreen, or hazard pay.
The idea grew in a high school lab and evolved into a university research project. They’re now refining the planting arm, testing battery endurance in real burnt zones, and negotiating pilot runs with municipalities in Leiria and Castelo Branco — two districts that have turned “extreme fire risk” into a permanent identity. The goal is swarm deployment: dozens of Trovadors crawling over slopes too steep for tractors, too dangerous for firefighters, working like a robotic reforestation brigade.
Portugal loves talking about innovation, but its wildfire crisis is a slow-motion national trauma no drone pitch deck can fix. What makes Trovador different is its attitude: not utopian tech-saviorism, but a gritty, ground-level hack made by kids who grew up inhaling smoke and hearing helicopters before they heard birds.
If the country’s forests have a future, it might arrive on six legs, humming quietly through the ashes, planting hope one capsule at a time.
