A fourth-year finance major in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a prototype for a rope-climbing, ground-controlled robotic arborist system that allows tree care workers to stay on the ground.
Penn President J Larry Jameson has announced Margaret Zhu, who founded Serpent Robotics to further develop the device, as a recipient of the 2026 President’s Innovation Prize, which empowers Penn undergrads to design and undertake year-long post-graduation projects that make a positive, lasting difference in the world. Zhu will receive US$100,000 in implementation costs for Serpent Robotics and a US$50,000 living stipend.
‘Margaret aims to increase safety in one of the most dangerous jobs in our country,’ Jameson said. ‘Her use of cutting edge-technology together with human insight is quintessentially Penn and will help protect arborists while improving the industry.’
Zhu said that she and the Serpent Robotics team – Steyn Knollema, Jason Li and Yiran (Kevin) Xuan, Master’s students in the Integrated Product Design programme – will iterate the design and pilot it with four residential tree care companies in Pennsylvania and Seattle.
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Zhu will be mentored by Jeffrey Babin, professor and associate director of engineering entrepreneurship in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the engineering faculty director for Venture Lab.
‘If you’ve ever watched an arborist climb a tree with a chainsaw, you realise how dangerous tree care is,’ Babin said. ‘Serpent Robotics is leveraging robotics to improve safety and address labour shortages in tree care. Serpent’s robot is the first-of-its-kind to allow remote operation and branch removal.’
According to Zhu, the robot is about 60 centimetres tall and made from machine-cut parts, including custom-made steel plates and 3D-printed parts.
After a rope is placed in the tree, the robot, which has a motorised ascender, is attached to it. Tree care workers then use a Nintendo-like remote control – equipped with a camera feed from the robot – to control where the robot goes.
The system has two claws to clamp onto the branch and blades to make the cuts; the operator can either let the branch drop or have the robot hold the cut branch on the way down, so it doesn’t hit anything below.
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Zhu’s number one goal with Serpent Robotics is to improve safety. ‘If we’re saving people’s lives or saving someone from getting hospitalised, we’re doing our job correctly,’ she said. ‘Because it’s such an overlooked industry, it really gives us extra interest in working on this problem.’
Zhu says she also hopes the technology will improve labour shortages and help utilities increase vegetation management while keeping costs down.
Serpent Robotics got its start in the autumn of 2024 with Y-Prize, a competition organised by Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Penn Center for Innovation and Penn Engineering. Tasked with designing a commercial use case for a robotic arm, Zhu, Knollema, Li and Xuan came up with digital renderings for a tree-cutting robot and the team was named a finalist.
They then applied to Venture Lab’s Startup Challenge and won US$20,000, allowing the team to develop a basic prototype at Pennovation Works last summer. Next, they participated in Venture Labs’ VIP-X accelerator programme, learning from experts about raising capital, marketing and more.
‘All the resources that Penn has put into creating this entrepreneurial ecosystem and hub have paid off,’ Zhu says. ‘We could not be more grateful.’