(Frederique Olivier/Downer Productions)

If you’re the kind of person who can’t resist a serious-sounding story made palatable by a huge dose of adorable, then surely you caught the robot-penguin news this week.

The serious part: a study looking into new ways to conduct scientific observations of penguins and seals in the wild — minimizing the disturbance caused by human observers.

The adorable part: basically a little remote-controlled vehicle adorned with what looks like a baby-penguin plush toy.

This “penguin-bot,” as io9 dubbed it, was surprisingly successful at mingling with actual penguins. In fact, at one almost intolerably cute juncture, it was evidently mobbed by actual baby penguins.

Motherboard writer Becky Ferreira puts this cutie-bot in the category of “camouflaged reconnaissance robots” and notes a couple of previous examples.

The impressive result is summarized in this clip from the BBC, in which image-capturing devices made to look like fish and other aquatic creatures shot wonderful footage of dolphins that would have been unlikely to accept a human in their midst.

Ferreira also pointed out prior research involving waterborne, camera-equipped craft made to resemble crocodiles in order to study hippos — which can be surprisingly dangerous. About a minute into this video, in fact, a hippo makes a run at one of the croco-bots. (Despite the shameless soundtrack, it all works out.)

Poking around a little more led me to wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas’ BeetleCam — which is not disguised as an animal at all. Instead it’s a sort of fortified, remote-controlled mini-buggy that gets a camera up close to lions and other wild animals without the documentarian risking her life. Evidently these photogenic beasts are more willing to put up with what looks like a rolling lunchbox than with homo sapiens.

Burrard-Lucas has made several versions of the device in the past few years, the more recent iterations equipped with both a still camera and a video-taking GoPro.

It turns out that at some level the idea of robots mingling with animals is just a modern update of a long-standing research practice.

“Since the inception of the field of ethology,” this overview in The Scientist notes, “researchers have been using simple physical models of animals — ‘dummies’ — to examine the social behavior of real animals, and biologists began animating their dummies as soon as technology would allow.”

Physicist José Halloy has been a pioneer in this area. One of his early efforts involved robots that could buddy up with, um, roaches.

OK, OK, not very cute. But this was evidently a successful early example of a “mixed aggregation society” — a demonstration that animals and machines could successfully mingle for the benefit of human study.

Later Halloy and roboticist Francesco Mondada embarked on an experiment involving a more charismatic subject: baby chicks.

Chicks are known to form a bond, or “imprint,” with “nearly any moving object they encounter in the early hours of their lives,” as this Nautilus article put it.

So researchers came up with a color-lit, beep-emitting mobile gizmo, roughly the size of a mother hen — PoulBot, it was evidently called. It worked with about 60 percent of its adorable little subjects.

View photos Baby chicks with the PoulBot More

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