Teen builds ‘Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle’ to detect ecological threats

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Fifteen-year-old Evan Budz was on a camping trip when he saw a snapping turtle that would become the impetus for an award-winning invention. As someone who loves hiking, canoeing, and just being outside, the Canadian high school student from Burlington, Ontario, had actively been looking for ways that he could go out and help the planet. 

“My parents brought me up with the sort of principle that every place that I visit, I should leave it a bit better than I found it,” he says. So when Budz noticed the turtle swimming in some nearby waters, he knew that he’d found his next passion project: a bionic robot turtle that could help protect underwater environments. 

How a turtle inspired an award-winning science project

“When I saw the snapping turtle, it was so graceful, fluidic, and generally non-disruptive” to its surroundings, says Budz. “I thought it’d be really interesting to go and try and replicate its natural swimming kinematics [basically the study of how things move]” in a robot.

Along with mimicking the fluid motions of a wild green sea turtle in the water, his autonomous device uses AI to monitor underwater ecosystems for ecological threats, such as invasive species and coral bleaching. 

“Most current underwater technologies can produce things like noise from their propellers or very high-pressure water streams,” which can erode environments, he says. 

However, by mimicking the motions of a sea turtle, Budz’s robot can move through the water innocuously, gathering vital data in a way that doesn’t stress marine life or damage delicate habitats. “I don’t want to harm the various places that I’m hoping to protect.”

How to build a robot turtle

To create his bionic turtle, Budz got to work studying the reptile’s locomotion. He watched videos of sea turtles swimming and talked with experts at his local aquarium, learning how the reptiles use their front flippers to propel themselves forward and their hind limbs for steering. He then used his 3D design and electronics know-how to plan a prototype in SolidWorks, a 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and engineering software. From there, the high school student started creating his robot turtle’s 3D parts. 

The robot has four flippers in total—with the larger front flippers providing its main propulsion and its smaller rear flippers used mainly for stability and changing direction, just like a real turtle. It also has a main acrylic tube “body” for housing its electronic components, which include a Raspberry Pi microcomputer. This runs AI models to detect environmental threats and records and transmits data. In addition, the bionic turtle navigates the water using various sensors. These include a GPS module for position tracking, allowing the robot to follow a predefined grid pattern. 

Budz’s robot also has a front camera for “seeing” its surroundings, along with additional sensors on its exterior to help guide the autonomous reptile, offer depth control, and check for ecological hazards like microplastics and bleached coral. 

Meet the Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle, aka BURT

While not an official name, Budz has been calling his invention “BURT,” an acronym for “Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle.” BURT maintains the same body-to-flipper-size proportions as a real-life sea turtle but is smaller overall, which allows it to move easily in different environments. It weighs about 11 pounds, though much of the robot’s weight is just added metal that allows it to sink down. This gives BURT an opportunity to monitor depths well below the water’s surface. 

“To achieve neutral buoyancy in the water,” says Budz, “I needed the turtle to basically be heavier than the force of buoyancy that’s pushing it up.” 

BURT can swim for up to eight hours per charge on a lithium battery, though it also has a solar panel that can keep it going for even longer periods. Right now, Budz has BURT set up to swim at the typical speed of turtles (approximately 0.5 miles per hour). “If I do want it to swim faster, I can just change the flipper oscillation frequency,” meaning the rate of its flipper strokes. 

Most of BURT’s testing has taken place in Budz’s grandparents’ backyard pool, which has a depth of just over eight feet. 

“I basically went out and created a simulated coral reef setup using 3D models,” he says, programming the turtle to understand what coral bleaching and invasive species actually look like. “And the turtle then swims around them to simulate what it would do in a real-world environment.” 

BURT is also set up to follow a predetermined search pattern, “so there’s no need for any sort of tether like you might find on a traditional underwater drone.” The bionic turtle scans its surrounding waters through its front-mounted camera, with all of the recorded data then feeding back into its Raspberry Pi microcomputer. According to the Budz’s testing, BURT has been able to detect replicated coral bleaching with 96 percent accuracy.

BURT, the robot turtle, keeps getting smarter

Budz’s next step is to bring BURT into different environments to see how deep the robot can actually go. To deal with especially murky waters, he has installed lights on the front of the robot and added an ultrasonic transducer, which utilizes high-frequency sound waves to detect potential obstacles. 

This year he’s even developed a new holographic imaging device, which he’s using to record the structural characteristics and shapes of tiny particles in waterways. He then uses a custom-trained neural network, which processes data in a way that’s similar to a human brain, to classify if each particle is a microplastic. 

Although Budz built his robot as a labor of love, it’s since won some major awards, including first prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, held in Latvia in 2025, and the Canada-Wide Science Fair, an annual science fair in which finalists qualify from approximately 25,000 competitors. 

Budz’s goal is to have a fleet of these sea turtles that can be set out to detect ecological threats. “I’ve already looked at coral bleaching, invasive species, and microplastics,” he says, “but there are so many different places where this can be used.”

In The Workshop, Popular Science highlights the ingenious, delightful, and often surprising projects people build in their spare time. If you or someone you know is working on a hobbyist project that fits the bill, we’d love to hear about it—fill out this form to tell us more.

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