Related papers: Autonomous Forest Inventory with Legged Robots: Sy…
Legged robots are increasingly being adopted in industries such as oil, gas, mining, nuclear, and agriculture. However, new challenges exist when moving into natural, less-structured environments, such as forestry applications. This paper…
Autonomous harvesting and transportation is a long-term goal of the forest industry. One of the main challenges is the accurate localization of both vehicles and trees in a forest. Forests are unstructured environments where it is difficult…
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest…
Forests, as critical components of our ecosystem, demand effective monitoring and management. However, conducting real-time forest inventory in large-scale and GNSS-interrupted forest environments has long been a formidable challenge. In…
Covering one third of Earth's land surface, forests are vital to global biodiversity, climate regulation, and human well-being. In Europe, forests and woodlands reach approximately 40% of land area, and the forestry sector is central to…
Forestry is a major industry in many parts of the world. It relies on forest inventory, which consists of measuring tree attributes. We propose to use 3D mapping, based on the iterative closest point algorithm, to automatically measure tree…
Many LiDAR place recognition systems have been developed and tested specifically for urban driving scenarios. Their performance in natural environments such as forests and woodlands have been studied less closely. In this paper, we analyzed…
According to the European Union's Habitat Directive, habitat monitoring plays a critical role in response to the escalating problems posed by biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Scree habitats, hosting unique and often…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
Vehicles with prolonged autonomous missions have to maintain environment awareness by simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Closed loop correction is substituted by interpolation in rigid body transformation space in order to…
Detailed forest inventories are critical for sustainable and flexible management of forest resources, to conserve various ecosystem services. Modern airborne laser scanners deliver high-density point clouds with great potential for…
Drones are increasingly used in forestry to capture high-resolution remote sensing data, supporting enhanced monitoring, assessment, and decision-making processes. While operations above the forest canopy are already highly automated,…
This paper shows the achievement of a sensing and navigation system of aerial robot for measuring location and size of trees in a forest environment autonomously. Although forestry is an important industry in Japan, the working population…
Mobile robots are increasingly utilized in agriculture to automate labor-intensive tasks such as weeding, sowing, harvesting and soil analysis. Recently, agricultural robots have been developed to detect and remove weeds using mechanical…
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is the standard technique used to create accurate point clouds for digital forest inventories. However, the measurement process is demanding, requiring up to two days per hectare for data collection,…
This paper describes an end-to-end pipeline for tree diameter estimation based on semantic segmentation and lidar odometry and mapping. Accurate mapping of this type of environment is challenging since the ground and the trees are…
By-tree information gathering is an essential task in precision agriculture achieved by ground mobile sensors, but it can be time- and labor-intensive. In this paper we present an algorithmic framework to perform real-time and on-the-go…
This paper introduces the Terrain Recognition And Contact Force Estimation Paw, a compact and sensorized shoe designed for legged robots. The paw end-effector is made of silicon that deforms upon the application of contact forces, while an…
This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve…
We propose a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in densely vegetated environments with a variety of pliable/traversable and non-pliable/untraversable vegetation. We present a novel few-shot learning classifier that can be…