Related papers: Exploring the Potential of Multi-modal Sensing Fra…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Biodiversity monitoring using audio recordings is achievable at a truly global scale via large-scale deployment of inexpensive, unattended recording stations or by large-scale crowdsourcing using recording and species recognition on mobile…
Automatic monitoring of tree plantations plays a crucial role in agriculture. Flawless monitoring of tree health helps farmers make informed decisions regarding their management by taking appropriate action. Use of drone images for…
Africa is experiencing extensive biodiversity loss due to rapid changes in the environment, where natural resources constitute the main instrument for socioeconomic development and a mainstay source of livelihoods for an increasing…
The ability to recognize objects is an essential skill for a robotic system acting in human-populated environments. Despite decades of effort from the robotic and vision research communities, robots are still missing good visual perceptual…
Drones have a fairly short range due to their limited battery life. We propose an adaptive exploration techniques to extend the range of drones by taking advantage of physical structures such as tall buildings and trees in urban…
Applications of drones in emergency response, like firefighting, have been promoted in the past decade. As the autonomy of drones continues to improve, the ways in which they are integrated into firefighting teams and their impact on crews…
Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, changing the geographic range and abundance of many species. However, there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species, due principally to the amount of effort…
Drones are becoming increasingly used in a wide variety of industries and services and are delivering profound socioeconomic benefits. Technology needs to be in place to ensure safe operation and management of the growing fleet of drones.…
The utility of aerial imagery (Satellite, Drones) has become an invaluable information source for cross-disciplinary applications, especially for crisis management. Most of the mapping and tracking efforts are manual which is…
Scattered trees outside of dense, closed-canopy forests are very important for carbon sequestration, supporting livelihoods, maintaining ecosystem integrity, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. In contrast to trees inside of…
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation…
Big streams of Earth images from satellites or other platforms (e.g., drones and mobile phones) are becoming increasingly available at low or no cost and with enhanced spatial and temporal resolution. This thesis recognizes the…
Insects play such a crucial role in ecosystems that a shift in demography of just a few species can have devastating consequences at environmental, social and economic levels. Despite this, evaluation of insect demography is strongly…
Several situations exist where a geographic region of some size needs to be scanned or monitored through many sensors. Still, it is either absolutely impossible or prohibitively expensive to deploy and maintain wireless communication…
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…
Reliable detection of humans beneath forest canopy remains a difficult remote-sensing challenge due to sparse, structured, and viewpoint-dependent occlusion. This paper presents a multimodal proof-of-concept pipeline that integrates three…
Bio-loggers, electronic devices used to track animal behaviour through various sensors, have become essential in wildlife research. Despite continuous improvements in their capabilities, bio-loggers still face significant limitations in…
Search processes in the natural world are often punctuated by home returns that reset the position of foraging animals, birds, and insects. Many theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies have now demonstrated that this strategy can…
Saving rainforests is a key to halting adverse climate changes. In this paper, we introduce an innovative solution built on acoustic surveillance and machine learning technologies to help rainforest conservation. In particular, We propose…