As you all know, robotics and artificial intelligence
are on their way to revolutionize space exploration.
We are only at the beginning.
NASA will soon send this robot to Mars.
It will not only move around while reporting exceptional images to us,
but it is equipped with an articulating arm
that will allow us to explore the origins of life on this planet.
I think and I will demonstrate to you
that robotics can also revolutionize
our approach to life on our planet this time,
and especially in these animal populations
that I have studied since the start of the 1970s.
I am talking about the King Penguin,
in the southern territories in the Crozet Islands,
which we call "the French Galapagos" and contains around 25 million seabirds.
So at the core of all studies -
in particular a study leading us to discover
an anti-microbial molecule in the stomach of penguins
that enables them to keep fish intact for three weeks,
at their own body temperature of 37 degrees ...
Have you ever tried to keep fish at 37°C?
Well, it becomes a terrible poison after a few days.
... It enables them to preserve fish for three weeks
and to feed their hatching chicks if their partner hasn't come back in time.
But I want to talk to you about another approach,
through these identifications
that consists of following the evolution of their reproductive success and survival
as indicators of climate change.
To do so obviously, we need a study with no experimental bias.
But it is impossible to know if the technique used
to follow them, identify them and localize them,
if this technique,
due to the inconveniences brought in the penguins' moves in the water
had any impact.
In any case, it lasted twenty years.
And one day. while reading a TV guide,
I discovered the existence of this new technique
commonly used today for dogs and cats:
the small chip that goes under their skin.
It helps vets identify the animal
by placing an antenna a dozen centimetres away
because the problem, the limiting factor of this technique
is that identification is done by using radio frequency
since there is no battery,
and this lack of battery is what makes it possible to have a chip that small,
about 0.8g for the one we use.
So of course, we began
by deploying those chips among the penguins,
half of which were already ringed and the other half were not.
The result was shocking.
We were at the beginning of the 1990s when we started this work,
and we published it in 2011.
So it took ten years.
Now how did we do it?
We installed antennas in the earth, at their crossing points.
The first crossing lets us know
whether the animal is coming back from the sea or leaves it's colony,
the chip being close to the earth at level with their feet
precisely for it to be a short distance away.
This way, we can follow thousands of birds without disturbing them,
except that we equipped a number of them to study the impact of rings.
The result of this shocking impact due to the hindrance of the rings when swimming
is that when they go away for 20 days, for example,
they take on an extra ten days.
This is a very alarming result
because it means that their reproductive success is lowered by 40%
and their survival by 16%.
That's why we did the cover of Nature with commentaries ...
You can see here the words chosen by the editors:
"Marked for life".
In this case of course,
the reproductive success that was followed by numerous colleagues
around the whole world, by all the teams including abroad,
all those results were clearly biased.
We can't use reproductive success as an indicator of climate change
when it is lowered by 40% in ten years.
Today we do without since we are using chips instead
and, at the moment, we are following 18,000 penguins of different species,
particularly lots of King Penguins, without disturbing them.
But I wanted to go even further.
My ambition was to understand
how such a colony of 20,000 couples is structured.
Obviously it's out of the question to have a human walk in the colony on foot,
to come close to each individual to see if they have a chip.
So, I had this idea -
which made some of my colleagues smile who said,
"That's just an early retiree's fad, it will never work" -
of creating robots to identify them.
I had to prove them whether or not approaching the penguins with the robot
was likely to cause disturbance,
otherwise it wasn't worth doing it obviously .
So to do so, we used these kinds of watches
that are used for jogging.
They measure your heart rate,
and your heart rate is an excellent indicator of stress.
We compared the change in their heart rates
when a human approaches them and when a robot does so.
The approach lasts 30 seconds, then the human or the robot stops.
The increase in their heart rates with the robot was relatively low: 16%.
This is exactly the value we see
when penguins pass through the colony next to brooders,
so a minimal disturbance
since they are defending their territory, you will see that.
And as soon as the robot stops,
the brooder's heart rate comes back down
to its initial value, its initial "fluctuation" value we could say.
Now it is quite different in the case of a human.
You can see that their heart rate increases much more.
Moreover, it stays at this very high value
for the entire time the human is there, even when he stops moving.
And you even have to wait for six or seven minutes after he's left
for it to get back to its initial fluctuation value.
It is due to the fact that, in contrast with the robot's presence,
a human even perfectly still,
creates a reaction of avoidance in all the penguins.
They retreat with their egg on their feet, and that destrutures the colony.
So it's an enormous stress.
Imagine in a colony of 20,000 couples, what that could provoke.
(Video) (Screams of penguins)
We were able to start a study on this King penguin,
with, as you'll see, a robot that approaches them
and causes individuals without eggs
and so not defending their territory to move apart.
In contrast, those who do have eggs -
you can see a curious little one following... (Laughter)
...as the robot progresses -
those who have eggs defend their territory
with their beaks and fins.
So this will help us - and we are starting to do this -
to identify and localize them
within centimetres, thanks to an extremely advanced GPS,
and to know how the animals are distributed in the colony,
and so how the colony is structured
depending on their experience and their age,
and this will allow us to understand for the first time,
how a colony operates.
I will show you now
that when this robot is equipped with a camera,
you can easily see that they defend their territory.
The feeling of it going faster although it is the same speed
is because the camera is on the robot.
You see, they use their beak -
this is what causes their heart rate to increase by 16% -
to attack the robot.
Sometimes, it was hard to get through, so we just built another one.
It took us a year because we're pushing the boundaries in miniaturization.
This new robot being a little smaller will be easier to move through.
Let's this robot park itself near the biologist who is driving it,
and let's move on to the closest parent of the King penguin
that is the Emperor penguin -
the star of the movie in "March of the Penguins."
By the way, it is the same colony in Adelie Land where the film was shot.
There, I encountered a problem.
Why?
Because the Emperor penguin - as you may have seen in this movie -
doesn't try to defend its territory.
It is an exception in the animal kingdom.
Most animals, except some species
which just happen to live in cold regions,
show a behavior of territorial defense.
So, what happens is that the Emperor penguins,
although a lot more powerful than the King penguin,
when they notice the robot approaching,
they recoil because they don't have this territorial defense reflex.
They do the same thing as the Royal penguins you just saw
on the outskirts of the colony who moved away when the robot arrived
but did it because they didn't have any eggs.
Why don't they defend their territory?
In winter, they huddle together.
This is what enables them to fast for four months.
They halve their speed of emaciation by huddling together.
And thus - I created some suspense here -
I'm going to show you the solution we have adopted ...
(Exclamations of surprise) (Laughter)
... by concealing the small robot in a fake chick.
Now look at the behavior of the adult and the chick.
Not only do they let the robot come close,
but their movements indicate that they are singing
to try to communicate with it.
And this little chick can even be part ...
(Exclamations)
... of a nursery of chicks.
But we wanted to go further.
As a matter of fact, in the coldest moments in Adelie Land
in some colonies, the temperature can go down to 50 °C below zero.
For the robot to be autonomous enough during that period,
we'd need batteries that are two times its size.
And with a little chick, we can only hide a small-sized robot.
In addition, the artificial little chick can only be used
when other little chicks are around.
(Laughter)
So, I gave myself another challenge:
the fabrication of a fake adult Emperor penguin.
(Laughter)
I had proof that we can fool them, you're witnesses to this.
But it turned out to be a true technological challenge.
Making an upright robot wasn't an option for us
as it would fall over straight away - we have winds of 150 to 200 km/h.
So the idea was to build a sliding penguin.
Although you can't hear it, there is a sound ...
(Slight noise)
There you go! Listen. It is the sound of the robot sliding on the ice.
We built a first prototype with a magnificent costume
made by the best experts in the movie industry -
here you can see the team of young engineers around me -
a penguin equipped with crawlers
since we must move on ice, on the pack ice.
We sent it to Adelie Land.
(Laughter)
Now the results have been mixed
because, as you can see, it arouses curiosity, interest ...
(Laughter)
... from the unemployed penguins.
As for the brooders, they are still suspicious.
We have two possible explanations.
This magnificent costume, in fact,
does not reflect the image it should
because they see through the ultraviolet spectrum.
Furthermore, the crawlers make too much noise.
For two years, we have been constructing a new robot
that will have real feathers -
we came back with intact corpses from Adelie Land, found in the colony.
Taxidermists from the museum are currently preparing the skin.
It will have a real feathering
that will give a true image in the ultraviolet spectrum.
It will be able to move its fins.
It won't have crawlers.
It will slide on its hull, as you can see here,
and the noise of the sliding will mask the noise of the wheels that annoys them.
It will have a speaker because it will communicate with the real penguins.
You see, while we often oppose technology and Nature,
here we have an initiative in which technological development
will allow us to better understand Nature in order to better protect it .
We are also in the interface between ethics and science
since it means developing our scientific knowledge
by reducing the disturbance to animals
that, as you've seen, also reduces the risks of scientific bias.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)