Related papers: Towards autonomous photogrammetric forest inventor…
Visual Place Recognition and Visual Localization are essential components in navigation and mapping for autonomous vehicles especially in GNSS-denied navigation scenarios. Recent work has focused on ground or close to ground applications…
Autonomous field robots operating in unstructured environments require robust perception to ensure safe and reliable operations. Recent advances in monocular depth estimation have demonstrated the potential of low-cost cameras as depth…
Individual tree detection and crown delineation (ITDD) are critical in forest inventory management and remote sensing based forest surveys are largely carried out through satellite images. However, most of these surveys only use 2D spectral…
Autonomous exploration is a new technology in the field of robotics that has found widespread application due to its objective to help robots independently localize, scan maps, and navigate any terrain without human control. Up to present,…
Segmentation-based autonomous navigation has recently been presented as an appealing approach to guiding robotic platforms through crop rows without requiring perfect GPS localization. Nevertheless, current techniques are restricted to…
This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…
Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…
Autonomous tree pruning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a safety-critical real-world task: the onboard perception system must estimate the metric distance from a cutting tool to thin tree branches in real time so that the UAV can…
This paper presents a novel autonomous drone-based smoke plume tracking system capable of navigating and tracking plumes in highly unsteady atmospheric conditions. The system integrates advanced hardware and software and a comprehensive…
Increased growth in the global Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) (drone) industry has expanded possibilities for fully autonomous UAV applications. A particular application which has in part motivated this research is the use of UAV in wide…
Localizing ground devices (GDs) is an important requirement for a wide variety of applications, such as infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, search and rescue operations, to name a few. To this end, unmanned aerial vehicles…
Circular sample plots are a cornerstone of forest inventory, yet accurate measurement of tree diameter at breast height (DBH) and spatial location within such plots remains challenging. Conventional approaches rely either on costly…
Our previous works have demonstrated that visually realistic 3D meshes can be automatically reconstructed with low-cost, off-the-shelf unmanned aerial systems (UAS) equipped with capable cameras, and efficient photogrammetric software…
Tree canopy height is one of the most important indicators of forest biomass, productivity, and species diversity, but it is challenging to measure accurately from the ground and from space. Here, we used a U-Net model adapted for…
We tackle the challenging problem of creating full and accurate three dimensional reconstructions of botanical trees with the topological and geometric accuracy required for subsequent physical simulation, e.g. in response to wind forces.…
Drones are conventionally controlled using joysticks, remote controllers, mobile applications, and embedded computers. A few significant issues with these approaches are that drone control is limited by the range of electromagnetic…
Unmanned aerial vehicles, and multi-rotors in particular, can now perform dexterous tasks in impervious environments, from infrastructure monitoring to emergency deliveries. Autonomous drone racing has emerged as an ideal benchmark to…
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…
Remote sensing through unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has been increasing in forestry in recent years, along with using machine learning for data processing. Deep learning architectures, extensively applied in natural language and image…
At I/ITSEC 2019, the authors presented a fully-automated workflow to segment 3D photogrammetric point-clouds/meshes and extract object information, including individual tree locations and ground materials (Chen et al., 2019). The ultimate…