A group of European scientists working together with a UK wildlife filmmaker have developed a remote-controlled robot rover disguised as a penguin in order to intimately study colonies of shy Emperor penguins in Adélie Land, Antarctica.

In a paper entitled "Rovers minimize human disturbance in research on wild animals", published in the journal Nature Methods, the researchers, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France, describe how they were unable to study the colonies of p