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Few things in life have made me feel more privileged and amazed than the opportunity to swim with sea turtles in their natural habitat. The way these gentle creatures move through their underwater world with the deliberate, careful strokes of their fins is absolutely mesmerizing to watch.
It’s a unique style of movement – so much so that when I saw Pitbot’s robotic turtle swimming through a water tank on the show floor at… Consumer Electronics Show 2026I knew this wasn’t just a pool cleaning robot with turtle features. This was a thoughtful example of biomimicry in action.
That’s because the company’s engineers went on a two-month expedition to study sea turtles in their natural habitat, Beatbot’s Eduardo Campo told me as we watched Turtini (the team’s nickname for RoboTurtle) wander around his pool. “We did a lot of motion capture, like the stuff they use in movies, because we needed to develop those joints in it,” he said.
RoboTurtle will eventually be deployed as part of environmental research missions.
This is not RoboTurtle’s first time in… CES -Also appeared in 2025 as a fixed concept. This is the year, but he has found his fins, so to speak. Not only can he swim, but he can also respond to hand gestures: give him an OK sign, and he dances in response. But despite being cute and agile, RoboTurtle is a robot with an important mission.
RoboTurtle is an environmental research tool, created with input from researchers and NGOs, that can go where humans or other machines cannot for fear of disturbing complex and sensitive underwater ecosystems, especially coral reefs. It can move silently and naturally in a way that does not frighten wildlife, and monitors water quality and fish numbers using the built-in camera.
“One of the groups we are working with wants to study coral reefs near Indonesia,” Campo said. “There was a very big incident there with a boat that went up on the reef and disrupted the environment, (so) they want a robot that is as least intrusive as possible.”
He added that the group wants to deploy RoboTurtle for certain periods each year to monitor coral recovery and monitor fish populations. Beatbot is currently training the built-in AI to give RoboTurtle monitoring and recognition skills.
RoboTurtle moves just like a real turtle
At CES, I saw a robotic turtle not only paddling on the surface of a pool, but it can also dive up to five metres. However, it needs to resurface to send data and its GPS signal back to the base, just like a real turtle needs to come to the surface to breathe. This also gives it the opportunity to recharge via the solar panel on its back.
Although I’m impressed by RoboTurtle’s ability to swim, Campo estimates that the Beatbot team is still a year and a half away from perfecting its technique, with the robot ready for full deployment in three to five years.
CES 2026 is a show where technology with real purposes feels rare, so it’s certainly refreshing to see a company using its expertise to build something designed with a sustainable future in mind. It may be a while until we see RoboTurtle sailing the seas, but I’m glad I got to see him at this point in his journey.