Related papers: Towards autonomous photogrammetric forest inventor…
Forests offer essential resources and services to humanity, yet preserving and restoring them presents challenges, particularly due to the limited availability of actionable data, especially in hard-to-reach areas like forest canopies.…
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…
Access to below-canopy volumetric vegetation data is crucial for understanding ecosystem dynamics. We address the long-standing limitation of remote sensing to penetrate deep into dense canopy layers. LiDAR and radar are currently…
Rapid progress in embedded computing hardware increasingly enables on-board image processing on small robots. This development opens the path to replacing costly sensors with sophisticated computer vision techniques. A case in point is the…
Forest inventories rely on accurate measurements of the diameter at breast height (DBH) for ecological monitoring, resource management, and carbon accounting. While LiDAR-based techniques can achieve centimeter-level precision, they are…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
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…
Autonomous aerial navigation in dense natural environments remains challenging due to limited visibility, thin and irregular obstacles, GNSS-denied operation, and frequent perceptual degradation. This work presents an improved deep…
Drones will play an essential role in human-machine teaming in future search and rescue (SAR) missions. We present a first prototype that finds people fully autonomously in densely occluded forests. In the course of 17 field experiments…
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…
The advancement of autonomous drones, essential for sectors such as remote sensing and emergency services, is hindered by the absence of training datasets that fully capture the environmental challenges present in real-world scenarios,…
In recent years, consumer-grade UAVs have been widely adopted by first responders. In general, they are operated manually, which requires trained pilots, especially in unknown GNSS-denied environments and in the vicinity of structures.…
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…
We present an autonomous aerial system for safe and efficient through-the-canopy fruit counting. Aerial robot applications in large-scale orchards face significant challenges due to the complexity of fine-tuning flight paths based on…
Fast, autonomous flight in unstructured, cluttered environments such as forests is challenging because it requires the robot to compute new plans in realtime on a computationally-constrained platform. In this paper, we enable this…
Accurate classification of tropical tree species from unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging due to high species diversity and strong visual similarity among species at typical image resolutions (centimeters per pixel).…
Tree perception is an essential building block toward autonomous forestry operations. Current developments generally consider input data from lidar sensors to solve forest navigation, tree detection and diameter estimation problems. Whereas…
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary…
Forest carbon offsets are increasingly popular and can play a significant role in financing climate mitigation, forest conservation, and reforestation. Measuring how much carbon is stored in forests is, however, still largely done via…
Accurate estimation of forest biomass is crucial for monitoring carbon sequestration and informing climate change mitigation strategies. Existing methods often rely on allometric models, which estimate individual tree biomass by relating it…