Deborah Lupton / Servers in a Landscape / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0
By Emmet Cole
Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure. But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint.
If robotics is going to help build a more sustainable world, the robotics community has to answer some potentially awkward questions, starting with this one: How sustainable are robots themselves?
Across a full lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life, robots have an environmental impact. But the robotics community has, until now, lacked dedicated tools for calculating it.
