Two College Students Are Building a Robot to Replant Burned Forests
Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça invented Trovador, a six-legged, A.I.-powered robot that can plant trees in hard-to-reach, wildfire-damaged terrain
Ramsha Waseem - Freelance writer
November 25, 2025
Nineteen-year-olds Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça are developing a robot capable of reaching and reforesting areas where humans have been unable to.
Trovador
For 19-year-olds Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça, the forest was the intimate, untamed backdrop of their childhood. “It was a living playground where we built worlds, a sanctuary where the concepts of ‘importance’ were felt instinctively rather than taught,” says Bernardino. As children growing up near Lisbon, the two always believed that the forest would remain a constant in their lives.
But with each year, they watched as fires ravaged the forests not far from their homes, leaving behind scorched gray hillsides. Desperate to revive these forests, the two then-high school students set out to create Trovador—a robot capable of reaching and reforesting areas where humans have been unable to.
The state of Portugal’s forests
A 2024 study by Carlos C. DaCamara, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Lisbon, revealed that between 1980 to 2023, over 1.2 million acres burned in wildfires across mainland Portugal, equivalent to 54 percent of its territory. In 2017, the country recorded 32,000 acres of tree cover loss, with wildfire accounting for 75 percent of that destruction, the highest in a year to date. Moreover, Portugal is the southern European nation most affected by wildfires, based on the scale of burned areas and the sharp rise in recent wildfires.
To begin their project, Bernardino and Mendonça set out to understand the current methods used for reforestation and the reasons behind the forests’ slow recovery.
“The initial, passive hope that nature would heal itself was shattered when we learned the soil was too damaged and the fires too frequent for recovery,” Bernardino adds. Though volunteers and community members strived to revive the burned forests, it was physically impossible to reach the most vulnerable parts, which happened to be on steep, treacherous slopes.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/two-college-students-are-building-a-robot-to-replant-burned-forests-180987751/