Tidewalker

Terrain first

Mud, sand and shallow water change stiffness with every step. We trained a locomotion policy in simulation across 4,000 procedurally generated shorelines, then fine-tuned it on the real robot with less than two hours of field data.

Results

Tidewalker covers 3.2 km per charge and returned 1,100 geotagged samples in its first season, feeding the regional wetland monitoring programme.